What should I do?

More ad units, it looks a bit spammy but doing much better

[chocorol]

Well, a couple of months ago I was doing great in AdSense and my earnings reached the 4 digit amounts for the first time. I was very happy about that, but a few weeks ago everything changed and my earnings went down without previous warning. Nothing on my side changed, my traffic was exactly the same, I never changed my layout or anything like that, I only kept adding more content, but that didn't really help.

Yesterday I decided to make some changes. I used to have 2 units on most of my pages, one horizontal unit on the very top and a rectangle inside the content. Yesterday I added a vertical skyscraper just to test. I certainly don't like how does the site look now, too many ads for my taste and it looks a bit spammy, but today I checked my earnings and they're really improving fast... not to the old levels, but much better than the last few weeks....

So now, I'm in a dilemma... dont know what to do.. I certainly dont want to lose my new earnings, this ad unit is outperforming all of the other units... I tried to figure out if my audience didn't like it, but looking at my stats, I'm receiving the same page views per visitor and everything looks exactly the same. I know I should wait a few days more to drawn better conclusions, but as of now, it seems like they don't really care as much as I do...

What would you do in my case? would you keep the revenue and stand the "spammy" look of the site.

Jeez, I'm worried about it... am I overeacting? One thing I know for sure, is that it will be more difficult to get links if my site has too many ads on it... anyway, what do you think about it?

[purplecape]

If this new ad unit is attracting the lion's share of the clicks, have you experimented with removing one of the two other units to see what happens? In general, the smaller the number of ads you have, the better--not just because of appearance but because in theory that means you are getting the higher-paying ads....

[ken_b]

Are you using channels so that you can see how each location is performing?

[netmeg]

I'd leave it for a few day to see if the improvement continues before doing anything else.

And yea, hopefully each ad unit has its own channel so you can track.

[piatkow]

If you have a high proportion of regular visitors then they will become "ad blind" and occasional adjustments to placement will bring the ads back into their field of vision.

[johnnie]

Try to get your skyscraper to be the first unit in the HTML. Consider removing the top unit or positioning it using CSS. Whatever you do, get your best-performing ad unit as high up your code as you can. This will at least get the best-paying ads in there.

[Hobbs]

I feel your pain.

Yes 3 ad units per per page is too much and is the limit, yes you might observe less people linking to your site which means less traffic long term, and perhaps negative feedback from loyal regulars, and it is only you that can decide what your personal priorities are.

In addition to the above excellent suggestions, you can consider making the page more busy where 3 units won't look as spammy, a magazine page cannot sustain 3 ads, a busy newspaper page might get away with it.

[chocorol]

Thanks everybody for your replies. Yes, I'm using channels to track each and every ad unit. The new unit is not actually getting more clicks, instead, it's getting more impresions but as of now it's doing fine and almost as good as the leaderboard on the top of the layout. It is not outperforming the other ads anymore, but still gets a decent amount every day.

Most of my visitors (75% approximately) are new, so ad blindness is not really a problem. Mostly, people who visit my site are researching before getting some sort of "widget services".

I like what you say Hobbs. Currently I have all my articles splitted up, so one article uses around 4 o 5 pages. That's fine and people seem to be ok with that. I certainly couldn't afford to change every single page on my site.

I decided that 3 ads on each page looks way too spamy, but I have been thinking about something... right now my pages are set to have an appropiate width for users with screen resolution of 1024x768, so if someone with lower screen resolution visits my site will have to scroll horizontally. On the other hand, if someone with much higher resolutions visits the site, the content will stay still and wont occupy the whole screen.

I modified my css file and made a test version in which everything's set up for resolutions of 800x600. In this layout I skipped the skyscraper but the other units have more presence and everything looks cleaner. It also creates the illusion of having more content in each page, because of the reduced space, just like Hobbs said, now it looks more like a "newspaper" instead of a "magazine".

Think I will give it a try soon... who knows? it might perform well. Still, I keep in mind that only 14% of my visitors have 800x600 screen resolutions, and I know that the percentage will keep reducing as time goes by. What do you think about this idea? Anyone who has experimented with this before?

Will keep you posted.

[johnnie]

Chocorol, the percentage of people visiting your site with limiting resolutions is actually set to *explode* within a year (maybe two). Think mobile.