Quadrupled my CTR thanks to DP members.

The middle ads with the three OS icons have increased moderately, but I have seen a massive jump since implementing the images above the ads. The pages that just have a border around the ads also increased quite nicely.

All in all, I am quite happy with things. Hard to find images for say data backup... if someone want to draw some, let me know...

 

Thanks to everyone who recommended this technique. I've been running with my image rotation (and URL keyword targetting) code for a week now, and YES! It's working. My average CTR has TRIPLED. Very happy.

For the animals that produce relevant ads, like the gorilla, rhino, manatee etc, its a particularly sweet. As long as I title my posts correctly I'm almost guranteed that I'll get a match between image and ad when a user lands on a single post page.

 

Thanks for clarifying my confusion. What happens to people when they accidently break the TOS? I sent an email enquiry to google asking if I could put Adsense on my Poker Blog, as Poker is arguably not a form of gambling, but all their representative did was tell me that I couldn't put adsense on a blog with gambling or casino related content.

 

AmCy,
I´ve always found the service at Google As to be exemplary. You don´t get an answer in minutes but within aboout three days you do tend to get a personal reply - IMHO and experinece.

If the answer you got did not satisfy you, then tell them that and ask again.

 

Mate I'd love to know how you did the drawing with flash thing, I PM'd you a few days back - hope you can get back to me

 

my bad.. I did get your pm, but thought "no way i'm telling him how I made the flash drawing thing"

1) spend ages making it work well
2) would take pages to explain the flash -> asp -> db -> image processing
3) the company i work for now own the source, so can't go giving it away

however if you make your own, and you get stuck on something i could help you out, but im not about to go write a tutorial or post source code. sorry

tho if you follow this thread you can up your CTR a whole bunch

 

Care to post the code you are using to rotate images etc... you could also PM me. I am trying to find a good one.

 

I use this, I put some images into a dir and the select 4 random.
Remember to put AT LEAST 4 images into che directory.

In this manner I do not care of the images, when I found one that I like I put into the directory and star using it immediately.

<?php
// Prepare an array
$adimages=array();
// Build the path for the adsense images
$adimages_path="adimage/";
// Now read all images in the source dir
if (is_dir($adimages_path)) {
if ($dh = opendir($adimages_path)) {
while (($file = readdir($dh)) != false) {
if (preg_match("/[a-zA-Z0-9_-]+\.(jpg|gif)/", $file)) {
array_push($adimages, $file);
}
}
}
}
// Check if we have some images...
if (count($adimages) >= 4) {
shuffle($adimages);
$adimage0 = $adimages_path.$adimages[0];
$adimage1 = $adimages_path.$adimages[1];
$adimage2 = $adimages_path.$adimages[2];
$adimage3 = $adimages_path.$adimages[3];
}

echo<<<END
<table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellspadding="0" width="100%" align="center">
<tr><td align="center">
<table border="0" cellspadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="728" align="center">
<tr bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<td width="182" align="left"><img src="$adimage0"></td>
<td width="182" align="left"><img src="$adimage1"></td>
<td width="182" align="left"><img src="$adimage2"></td>
<td width="182" align="left"><img src="$adimage3"></td>
</tr><tr bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><td colspan="4" align="center">

YOUR ADSENSE CODE

</td></tr></table>
</td></tr></table>
<br>
END;
?> 

PHP:

 

How would you place that in an external file and use it as an include. My php skills are not the greatest...

 

Just save that code as whatever.php then on the page that you want to use it just put <?php require('whatever.php') ?>.

 

too complicated - try http://www.alistapart.com/articles/randomizer/

 

How do you get it to randomize between 4 different images?

 

What does your URL keyword targeting do? Thanks.

 

I used this php script: http://automaticlabs.com/products/rotator

It's very easy to install. All you have to do is copy rotator.php into a directory with your images. Then link to the rotator.php file where you would normaly link to your images.

I setup 4 directories with different images in each directory and a copy of the rotator.php script in each directory. Probably not the best way to do it from a code efficency point of view, but it works well.

You never get the same image on the page more than once this way. If you only use 1 directory you end up with a slot machince effect.

People might sit there all day refreshing the page trying to get 4 of a kind
The best I could get was a pair

 

heh, if u know a little code u could get in there and fix it

 

I mentioned earlier in this thread that I wrote a little bit of JS to pick out certain keywords from the URL of my blog post (dervied from the post Subject) - a simplistic contextual recognition system to pick the most relevant image for the currently viewed post.

When the post generates suitable AdSense ads, this invariably means I end up with a IMAGE/AD match, with no effort at all on my part.
eg gorillas , rhinos
and manatees

For the Index and Archive pages, I'm displaying random pictures, just for fun.

And I'm using the images as links to my most relevant posts in each topic.

 

what kind of ctr do people have for their google adsense? I'm getting about 3%. It is that good?

 

3 percent is pretty good, but you should aim higher. Using the technique outlined in this thread, you can increase your CTR a great deal.

AmCy

 

Well 3% CTR far better than mine (http://kawebspy.kawebspynet.com). I only have less than 2% CTR.

 

No question but that just putting the images out helps.
Seems like color is better than black and white at least for my bottom of page setup.
I use a simple single banner. I don't have a whole lot of backup images nor do I want the system to run php for each page view!