Bad Site = More Money

or how not to improve your website

[btas2]

I have one small website that I don't work on much but which generates a few dollars a day on average so it way more than pays for itself over time.

It's a messy site which just "grew" without any coherent design and with poor page-to-page navigation.

Having nothing better to do I decided to tidy it up. I made a really nice site using the same page content and page names (to keep the search engines happy). Very smooth CSS design. Looks great.

Of course the expected happened. Traffic stayed pretty much the same but the CTR plummeted and earnings dopped.

I'm now in the process of messing it up again and making it ugly and hard to navigate and if that fails, I'll simply stick the old site back in place.

For a site that you want to grow, develop traffic and attract users, a good design may payoff in the long term, but on a small site that just sits there and doesn't get much attention, poor design and confused users seems to convert to higher reveue. I'd wondered about this in the past. Now I know!

[danimal]

>>>with the websites I have that have poor content, the click through rate is 3 times higher than the websites with excellent content. Content is king - but poor content pays better.<<<

not in the long run.

any dummy can drive up the ctr regardless of the content, but raising the epc is what ensures long-term earnings.

i think that many websites that are built with adsense ctr as the goal will get penalized by lower epc somewhere down the line... perhaps it's the google way of making sure that advertisers get a decent r.o.i.?

[JoeS]

The home page of my site doesn't look great and it has been the same way for about 5 years. But I get 10% or more click-through on the page so I am reluctant to change it even though it would look better.

[Raymond]

On one of my content page the main ad used to get around 1.7% CTR. On the right side of the page, it was loaded with 10 more random items with a small thumbnail next to it. I decided to change the script to load "related" items and display much bigger thumbnail. Average pageview went up from 7 to 9, but CTR dropped to 0.7%. Earning dropped quite a bit because of this.

I am still testing if the size of the thumbnail has bigger effect on CTR or the relevancy of the links.

[edited by: Raymond at 8:03 am (utc) on Jan. 9, 2007]