Opinions on Performance

[druidelder]

I have some questions about how the AdSense campaign for the site I work on is doing. Any input you have is appreciated.

The site is a job posting/application site. We essentially have a lock on the positions available in our market. Most of the ads are for other job posting sites (but most of the jobs on those sites that would be listed on our site simply redirect people to us). There are blended text ads below the header banner for the site and again at the top of the footer. We haven't done much with trying different placement schemes as we started AdSense recently. We have several changes planned to see what works best.

I have noticed that the last couple of weeks that some ads appear in both the upper and lower leaderboard at the same time. The lower leaderboard earns at about half the upper one. We are thinking about removing the bottom one to see how that changes things. We're also going to try the top one as a skyscraper to the right. I am also going to try the smaller leaderboard to see how fewer ads will change earnings.

I'm trying to figure out how well we are doing with our AdSense campaign. I spent a few days searching the forums before posting, but I didn't find much about sites that fit in the same scale.

We are also going to try some different campaigns to see how they do on our sight, but that is out of the scope of this forum.

Here is some background info:

Visitors/day ~ 35,000
Uniques/day ~ 25,000
New/day ~ 10,000
Page Views/day (not ad unit views) ~ 350,000
Average visits/visitor ~ 3
Average visit length ~ 9 minutes
Backlinks (as reported by Google) ~ 250
PR = 6

AdSense:

Impressions/day (page) ~ 160,000
Clicks/day ~ 2000
Revenue/day ~ 400


The site is in ASP.Net with a SQL Server back end. I have been looking for a tracking tool to help us optimize the ads a little better, but I haven't had much luck. The ones people seem to like are all PHP/MySQL based. I have seen some fee based ones, but haven't found much feedback on them. I just learned the trick to make GAnalytics work with AdSense, and we might try that.

We have not fully incorporated the tags for the AdSense bots to target content yet. We are working on it.

Questions:

1) For the numbers, does this seem like this site is performing low/moderate/high with AdSense?

2) What good tracking tools are available for ASP.Net/SQL Server?

------Extra Questions:
3) Am I missing any steps in the SEO that would help out?
See thread:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=182407

4) How often does the AdSense crawler come by (more often than the regular Google crawler), and does it crawl the whole site?

5) Much of the content does not get crawled by the regular Googlebot as the timeframe for its existance is too short. How does this affect ad placement?

[kh7]

well, from the sound of it the site is under performing. On a non-technical subject you should be able to get at least a 2% click through rate (per page), IMO. So start checking out different ad formats, color-schemes that sort of thing. With that amount of visitors you should be able to see fairly quickly which color-schemes outperform the others. (make a channel per color-scheme).

[qwestcommunications]

Since its a job listing site, with people here to search for jobs, perhaps, there is no need for people to go to another site to search for jobs. If they do go to other sites, they probably know the urls by heart and do not have to go through clicking on your ads.

[druidelder]

Since its a job listing site, with people here to search for jobs, perhaps, there is no need for people to go to another site to search for jobs. If they do go to other sites, they probably know the urls by heart and do not have to go through clicking on your ads.

We are looking at other ad campaigns to see if less targeted ads might do better. We have only been using AdSense for a couple of months, so we're just getting some data to really play with. What we're seeing is that the pages that have ads that are not job posting sites have a much worse CTR. This is weird to me, so we'll have to see how it works out.

It is possible that people click on them because the jobs we have are in a very specific market and they are looking for something for a spouse as well? I don't really know.

[JEET]

Hi,
I doubt that less targetted ads will perform better.
If I had that site, I might have concentrated on increasing the CTR.
You do have pretty attractive traffic stats. :)
Bye
We are looking at other ad campaigns to see if less targeted ads might do better. We have only been using AdSense for a couple of months, so we're just getting some data to really play with. What we're seeing is that the pages that have ads that are not job posting sites have a much worse CTR. This is weird to me, so we'll have to see how it works out.

It is possible that people click on them because the jobs we have are in a very specific market and they are looking for something for a spouse as well? I don't really know.

[asapcorp]

you have very good traffic. Not sure when I will get that much traffic on my site. Still working on...