Strategies to make my site convert better?

Rather than complaining about smart pricing, what to do to fix things?

[SnowDevil]

Ok so basically I'm fairly sure I must have been smart priced as I seem to be averaging 2-4 cents per click. The general consensus seems to be that smart pricing occurs when traffic from a publisher's site doesn't convert well for the advertisers. I've been working on what I believe is a fairly high quality site. The content is all original (Photoshop video tutorials for beginners - graphics district), and none of the ads appear to be MFA sites, but rather for very relevant products to the content of the site. At first the site was averaging at 10-15c per click but over the last few days it's dropped to around 2-4c.

So basically I guess this means Google thinks I don't convert well. Does anyone have any strategic suggestions for someone in my predicament? How can I make my site convert better? What sorts of reasons would a site convert badly if the site isn't a spammy ad site?

I've got a lot of plans for the site but at these prices it almost doesn't seem worth it...

[Atomic]

What kind of time frame are you talking about? You said that at first you were making 10-15c/click but in the last few days you've made 2-4c/click. If you made 10-15c/click for 3 years and for a few days it's dropped to 2-4c, I would suggest doing nothing different.

I've got a lot of plans for the site but at these prices it almost doesn't seem worth it...

I can imagine an argument were someone gets over a million uniques a day and 2-4 cents a click is just fine and dandy.

But it's important to have some time frame to consider. If you just started and are thinking of throwing in the towel because of something like this perhaps you're in the wrong business.

I would suggest checking your logfiles for what visitors are most interested in. There are always great clues to be found there.

[SnowDevil]

Haha, no not throwing in the towel. I have more than one site and more planned, and this site will continue to grow, it was more just a rhetorical musing that the clickthrough price might not be worth it if the trend continues. That said there may be other monetization opportunities I should explore for the site. But that's a topic for a different forum seeing as we're in the AdSense forum.

Thanks for the suggestion though, I'll take a deep look at analytics to see what people are looking at and for how long.

[vero]

My site wasn't doing very well when I first started in terms of of money or CTR, so I began to play around with ad placement. It all depends on the site, but I created channels to track which ad placements did best and was surprised at the results. You may want to try moving the ads around abit, (so long as it doesn't interfere with the integrity of your site of course :-) ). But sometimes, it makes a difference whether the ads are on, for example, the left side or the right side. I found that as my CTR improved, the amount I was getting did too

[tomp_gl]

My Adsense dropped to rock bottom since December. Adsense is a system so complicated my ad rep can't even give me an answer as to why my income has become a trickle. My advice to you is to look beyond Adsense to other publishers, and better still look beyond advertising to merchanising, subscription services and other sources because things are only going to get worse (especially for businesses dealing in intangibles) with the impending US/global recession.

[SnowDevil]

Thanks guys, good suggestions. Yeah I guess (besides growing traffic and adding more good content) it'll be important to test different monetization methods.