Critique on changes for super low ctr

[interwebink]

Hello,
I'm a newbie many ways, newbie to
adsense
running a blog
webmasterworld

I'm not a newbie to technology, however i'm having a really hard time breaking through even the 1% ctr rate. i'm lucky if i get .5

I just changed the layout a bit. I've seen some ppl generous enough to give critiques here and hoped someone would do so for me. Any takers?

Thanks in advance.

side note, front page is a little different from a story. the stories have adlinks near the title. I'm still torn on position of adlinks, under or over title?

[mack]

interwebink, first of all, welcome to WebmasterWorld.

One thing that does have a marked effect on ctr is ad targeting. Do you thing your ads are well matched with your content?

Mack.

[rajivatre]

If you are newbie for adsense and webmasterworld here is some way to start.
[webmasterworld.com...]
A post from martinibuster moderator for this forum.
Some of the posts are for paid members only but worth reading it.

Rajiv

[piatkow]

To push the CTR up you need well targetted ads. Not every site will get perfect targetting.
I have run sites where the topic is widget + location and these have always performed poorly in terms of CTR. One of the issues was that visitors were primarily interested in widgets but location was the stronger factor in targetting.

[netmeg]

A lot of it depends on the topic of your site. Is it targeting people who actually are in the buying process? I have a site that lists a certain type of (free) event. My site gets a ton of traffic; up to 70K unique visits per day in season. But my CTR is typically pretty low, because the people coming to my site are looking for information on these free events, they aren't necessarily looking to buy something. So while it earns pretty well due to the sheer numbers, if I had that kind of traffic on a site that specifically dealing with a product or products, and attracting visitors in a buying cycle - why then I'd probably be retired and typing this from a beach on my private island.

(I'm not. But soon...)

[HuskyPup]

however i'm having a really hard time breaking through even the 1% ctr rate

Well, I've broken through that today...on a downward spiral!

Bear in mind when I first started with AdSense right at the beginning my CTR was over 6% however these days I'm lucky to average 1.5% and yesterday and today 50% of that figure.

All I can tell you with any certainty is that my blogs average 300% more than my regular pages therefore any effort, when I have the time, goes into my blogs.

[graeme_p]

Think of it this way:

a) How many web pages do you browse per day?
b) How many times a day do you click on ads.

What is b as a percentage of a?

If you are anything like me a sub 1% CTR still means that your visitors are clicking more often than you do

[ken_b]

the stories have adlinks near the title. I'm still torn on position of adlinks, under or over title?

Above the title is probably ok, but I think that immediately under a title is not allowed, or at least discouraged.

You didn't say how long your articles are, but you might consider placing an adblock at the end of the articles. That has worked out well for many.

On my site, typically, an adblock in the left column will generate 5 times the CTR as the same adblock would if it were in the right hand column.

How many different size adblocks have you tried?

The 300x250 and 336x280 do very well on many sites, they might work well in the spot at the bottom of an article.

I've found that the 160x600 performs a little better than the 120x600.

[incrediBILL]

the stories

What kind of stories?

People don't tend to buy things then they're reading stories.

Nor do they buy things when reading joke sites, comix, etc.

If you want people to click, your content has to be about something someone needs right now, some goods or services they're looking to buy.

[tim222]

Here's a suggestion for improving CTR - if you are running mostly image ads, try running a page with text-only ads. Vice-versa, if you are mostly running text ads then experiment with image ads. My experience is that the two ad types respond very differently on the same page, although one type is not always better than the other. As always, it depends on the site.

[walrus]

I wonder about the impact of not just more publishers but less vigilance by Google. Today while checking a few articles I submitted to one of the most poular free article sites, i not only found someone has been taking credit as the author, but the sites they were on had more ads than i have ever seen. 2 towers stacked on each side, three in the middle, total of 7 adsense ads.
Seems like it is up to publishers to police adsense TOS.

I thought Google was all about automation, so why dont they automate a way to check our sites for this kind of nonsense ?
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