Lots of impressions, few clicks, remove or not?

[tennis fan28]

Hi everyone, I run a sports website and like every other sports site, I have a large photo gallery. I have been so busy building the site that I haven't paid much attention to Adsense until now. My gallery gets the most impressions but doesn't generate much in earnings, should I remove the ads and what effect would it have?

Since my last payment in July, I've had 200k+ impressions of which 163k+ (78%) came from the gallery. However of all my clicks, only 18% came from those pages which amounts to 29% of my earnings. I am not earning much now but I am rebuilding the site and I want to make as much as I can like everyone else. If I remove the ads, what would the effect be, positive or negative? So many people say so many different things so any insight anyone can give would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks a lot!

[koan]

I have a photo section also in one of my sites and I just recently removed adsense CPC ads from it because I blame it for smart pricing the whole web site. You can try referrals in it but I haven't experienced good performance in terms of CTR either. I may just try a few amazon / CJ ads and leave it at that. I guess I just came to accept it as good link and traffic bait, hopefully helping the rest of the site. But photo lookers aren't usually clickers or shoppers, in my experience.

[tim222]

My photo gallery gets an acceptable CTR so I suppose my pictures must not be very good :)

Actually, they're not too bad but I keep them small in size to minimize the effect of hot linking. Meanwhile, it's possible that my photos also discourage the type of people who don't click ads.

[alephh]

Just some random thoughts (to avoid answering your question ;-))...

+ Experiment with different gallery-designs: smaller pictures, how many pictures to show at once, where to place ads (with pictures, with gallery-view)... (unfortunately this takes time and effort to test properly).

+ Write enough text with each picture: may help adsense to target ads more efficiently.

+ Try to get some non-adsense ads that still are relevant to picture/topic.

+ Use pictures to draw in traffic to other sections of your website: If you have content page that is relevant to picture, make it very very clear that you have (hopefully interesting) content related to picture.

+ No ads at all: use that as a promotional/image edge: "you are such a nice guy and you have such a great website that you don't spam your photo-galleries with ads so users will have a great viewing experience."

[eeek]

One of my photos recently got referenced on a web site for a few days and cause a huge spike in traffic. That was good, but now all my non-photo pages are getting photo ads and ctr is in the dumps. Sigh.

[tennis fan28]

Thanks for all your information, I will try tweaking the descriptions of my pictures and see if that gets me any more relevant ads which isn't easy considering I have about 16k+ pictures. I was more or less wondering that since there are so many high views yet so few clicks, can this hurt my overall earnings for the site?

[eeek]

I will try tweaking the descriptions of my pictures and see if that gets me any more relevant ads

Just remember it can take quite a while for Google to see the new descriptions and change the ads.