Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Also, a visitor might not come back to your site when you do this, but when adsense is your only income from the site, what do you have to lose, that they don't come back in the future and have a chance to click on the ad then?
Just think if you were to pay for a newspaper ad. Would you want to place it in a tiny bottom corner in small letters, or put it right in the top (without users having to scroll down) middle of the page where it gets maximum visibility and therefore more clicks.
To some folks a good looking page full of usefull and/or interesting content is more important than a few extra dollars at the end of the month.
As far as losing visitors because you're smacking them in the face with ads, that's the last thing many want to do.
Traffic is what makes Adsense work, blow off enough traffic and it won't matter where you put ads, or even if you have ads on the site.
I've always been lucky in the SERPs. Updates come and go but my rankings stay stable. I personally think it is because webmasters visit my site, see that it is serious about providing content, and therefore link to my site (unreciprocated) thus helping my PR and such. If I was running an Adsense banner across the top of my pages I don't know if the look of my pages would truely suggest serious content.
The other thing about Adsense for so many of us (who ran sites before Adsense) was that it was a way to monetize a site without making it trashy.
I used to have to allow pop unders and almost considered in content (textual) advertising because it was almost the only way I could get sponsors. I dumped that trash when Adsense came along. I'll stay with the under stated/ under maximixed Adsense format.
Also, if correctly targeted, affiliate programs will leave adsense in the dust, (I made 100k last two months from them), but that is another topic altogether.
If your visitor leaves, you are only hoping that they come back, since the majority of people won't be coming back to your site (unless it's a news portal, or some type of current events site).
I have a travel-planning site, and unless my logfiles are incorrect, I get a lot of repeat traffic. Why? Because my site is designed to serve readers, and those readers come back at different stages of the travel-planning cycle.
For example, a reader might visit once while deciding "Where should I go?", again when planning transportation ("Should I rent a car or buy a rail pass?"), again when booking hotels, and so on. During the first stage, a reader might click on AdSense ads for tours, airlines, and other general products or services related to the topic at hand. Later on, the reader might click on AdSense ads for hotels or make bookings via affiliate links. Each visit represents a new opportunity to serve the reader and to profit from that reader.
I don't care what my clickthrough rate is, because bandwidth is cheap. What I do care about are my Adsense eCPM, AdSense total earnings, and affiliate revenues. Publishing a "reader-centric" site that encourages repeat visits has several advantages, including:
- Less dependence on search referrals. (If my Google referrals drop 70-75%, as they did for two months this spring, I still get a lot of traffic from internal referrals and repeat visitors.)
- More revenue per visitor (i.e., throughout the visitor's travel-planning cycle).
- More long-term revenue potential, because my audience consists of new visitors + repeat visitors, not just new visitors.
Obviously, this publishing model doesn't work for everyone, but don't knock it if you haven't tried it. :-)
Do you mean unique visits, hits? Ad impressions or page impressions?
Hope you don't mind clarifying it since your CTR and EPC must be so much above average.
With the right topic, the right content, on the right site, with the right traffic, you could easily do $200 a day with less than 500 page views.
Coming up with all four factors might take some thought, but it's a realistic number when the stars are all lined up.
As it is, I hang out with the "college not required" crowd, and all I can build is websites on things I know about, experiences or reviews. (like how to change diapers and raise kids)
My websites were also built before Adsense came out, and I'm still not comfortable with Adsense on my sites. (It amazes me when I'm browsing, to find a site that has zero ads on it, because I know it's a site that was put up in the original mindset called "Hey! We're on the Internet! Let's be friends!"
I've tried Adsense all over my sites, top, bottom, sides, and right in the face, in every way, shape and form. And you know what, they still generate the same amount of income that they always did.
My sites fall under, "You can lead visitors to your site, but you can't make them click."
I congradulate you on your abilities, knowledge, and even your earnings. Teach Me.
We would have never gotten to the point we are at had we followed your methods. We took a more longterm business plan bypassing instant gratification for longterm gain and the web is just great for that.
I would strongly suggest any novice that reads this thread understand the painful results of doing what the original poster said to do, you may make a quick buck but you will burn all you have worked for quickly.
There is also the chance of being in the right place at the right time with your site, one of my closest friends "hobby" site which turned into a authority site was recently purchased for deep 7 figure numbers from a mega network.
I guess thats what writing content for free at home gets ya:) Now back to my vodka tonics, no more bourbon for me!
Trader; With the right topic, the right content, on the right site, with the right traffic, you could easily do $200 a day with less than 500 page views. Coming up with all four factors might take some thought, but it's a realistic number when the stars are all lined up.
I believe most of us here would consider 5% CTR to be good and well above average from what I read in threads.
With a good 5% CTR you would need $8 per click to earn $200/day.
A typical CTR many experience seems to be about 2.5%. That means roughly $16 per click to equal $200.
Do you really think these $8 and $16 numbers are truly realistic?
I think the sole two points for a good ctr are
1) great color scheme, same back as your site background ( i prefer white ) and a very contrasting text on the advert, with same color of yoru html page text ). I prefer dark red or orange.
2) Stick to top fold only. dont waste your time puttign ads below the fold. Each such experiment will make you lose money .
Also, have a balanced content in your page. Never have scraped content.. you will lose ultimately. I try to keep the physical size ratio adsense: content as 30%:70% . ( I am talking of page length because i dont use vertical ads )
I don't know about that. I do know that 30-35%+ CTR and $1.00+ clicks on a long term basis are very realistic.
Easy? No. Realistic, definitely.
I'm sure we can talk click-thru rates specifically re: the AdSense TOS, but I can say I have one section of my site that doesn't pull over 1/4 of what the rest of the site does in click-through rates, even though the design is the same. I've experiemented with 3 or 4 different ad placements and never got much out of it. Top or bottom or centered or various placement, these people are here to learn, and read, and not to buy.
If you have external links on a page with Adsense on then open them in a new browser window - leaving your site with the ads on sat in the background.
Put Adsense ads on pages where there are no other exits from the page (except maybe your site nav) - I'm not saying don't link out but it is possible to put external links on other pages and leave your high content page just for the content and Adsense ads with a link back to a page that contains navigation.
wouldn't it make most sense to put it near the top center of the page, under the first heading
i think the poster is merely confirming the effectiveness of Goggle's heatmap.
settle for only a 3% CTR
Settle? I'd be thrilled for that high CTR!
I took advantage of the Google AdSense Optimization service recently just to see what they said about my site and even Google's person said my site was as optimized as possible, nothing they could recommend.
The only reason I'm making decent decent money is the sheer volume of traffic.
Sometimes it just is what it is.
I have about 100 sites with adsense on them (they are all autogenerated doorway sites
So....essentially what you're saying is, your a spammer spitting out auto-generated doorway crap (in violation of adsense TOS) to make a short-term buck, and will (most probably) get banned from adsense eventually. Thanks, but I'd rather make a low five digit check per month then a high five digit check just unti I "get caught".
We would have never gotten to the point we are at had we followed your methods. We took a more longterm business plan bypassing instant gratification for longterm gain and the web is just great for that.I would strongly suggest any novice that reads this thread understand the painful results of doing what the original poster said to do, you may make a quick buck but you will burn all you have worked for quickly.
There is also the chance of being in the right place at the right time with your site, one of my closest friends "hobby" site which turned into a authority site was recently purchased for deep 7 figure numbers from a mega network.
My sentiments exactly.
How some people can consider spamming the engines a valid business model is beyond me. Why on earth would you want to spend your time trying to stay "one step ahead" of the engines? I'll take my reliable content-based traffic any day over a "churn and burn" approach.
How some people can consider spamming the engines a valid business model is beyond me. Why on earth would you want to spend your time trying to stay "one step ahead" of the engines? I'll take my reliable content-based traffic any day over a "churn and burn" approach.
1) Not everyone has the ability to create a content-driven site.
2) Some people have very short attention spans.
1) Not everyone has the ability to create a content-driven site.
Agreed. That's why God created eLance.
2) Some people have very short attention spans.
Probably the same ones that cry everytime there's a minor shift in an engines' algo.
I don't know if is the right topic to put this
Im getting only 0,3% of CTR with above 4000 visualizations per day. Im hearing people talking in 3% minimun, so I want to know where to find some tricks. In the beggining, I put the banned in footer with an "Clike here to help". After this, I put together of my main menu, as a continuation. Now, I'm testing in the very header of the page.
I put the banned in footer with an "Clike here to help"
Interesting choice of words as "click here" near Google ads WILL get you banned and you'll have 0% CTR.
Try reading a bit here:
[google.com...]
Scroll down to the section "incentives" and see what Google has to say about what you did.
If you need to work on CTR, wouldn't it make most sense to put it near the top center of the page, under the first heading. I have that across all sites and it easily achives 10-20% CTR per day. I don't see why people would throw away money and not do this, and settle for only a 3% CTR.
Excellent post. I actually feel that a site with ads looks more professional, less "hobby-like". I feel that AdSense and CJ serve to create a context for the site's content.
I posted the Google heat-map on my wall. The scientific approach works very well in maximizing income--for me!
And don't let the criticism get to you! I'm reminded of the movie "Aviator"--Howard Hughes had many detractors, as do most successful people.
For other types of sites, focusing on increasing CTR may be the right thing to do, but in my experience, it can be misguided and actually reduce site growth and long-term revenue. Make changes to improve CTR when warranted, yes; focus on CTR, no.
I have 50,000 or so ad impressions a day and roughly 8-30 clicks a day.
I'm clearly doing SOMETHING wrong.
A 12% CTR would be making me a TON of money! How in the world...
I need help figuring out how you people pulled this off.
