Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I've been using Adsense since Sep03. I have a one-page site that has been getting roughly 500 uniques a day over that period. The page is an introduction/sign-up for the free service that I provide.
In the good old days I was getting ~$1 per click, but with the advent of smart-pricing it began to decline and now seems to have "bottomed-out" at ~$0.15 per click. The decline was demoralising and I had little time spare to work on the site, but now with a steady CPC I feel ready for a bit of growth! This is where I'm looking for advice...
The one page of my site has ~300 words of content (intro, features of the service, customer recommendations, reciprocal links etc) and I'm getting a healthy ~13% CTR with two ad units on the page (one ad rectangle and one adlink unit). How should I focus on growing my income?
+ Go for more link exchanges with "directories for free service X"?
+ Add more pages to the site (how to do this free service yourself - technical articles explaining the different aspects of the free service)?
+ Work on SEO?
Obviously doing all the above would help, but with limited time and resources, what should I focus on?
Thanks for your time.
Go for more pages!
While I generally suggest to add as much quality content as possible, maybe in this case the sitution is diferent.
alansk gets his 500 visitors looking for his free service. A nice 13% (let's say 65 of them) of them click on the ads.
If you add pages, I think that what will happen is that visitors will start reading his pages and get distracted, "forgetting" to click on the ads.
I don't think that overall number of clicks will be significantly larger.
So, I would rather say "Go for more traffic". If those 500 visitors were 5.000 visitors, the 65 clicks would be 650 clicks...
On the other hand, it would make a lot of sense adding pages if
1) one of the sub-pages can presumably be targetted to significantly better-paying ads.
2) building a small website around the main page can help its SERPs
With a CTR of 13% and a CPC of $0.15, it MIGHT be interesting to see if adwords traffic could pay for itself: it all depends on how expensive are the keywords for his free service.
Also, if that is the sign-in page for a free service, if it makes sense you could have the users return to that page sometimes (like periodically to confirm their email, or to keep their account live)
