Hi everyone, I recently had my website re-designed. The designer changed the url's to something more descriptive. For example (I'm making this one up), CleanComputerScreen to how-to-clean-a-computer-screen. He set up 301 redirects. Now, looking at Analytics. My site numbers have dropped by 10%, and my Adsense has absolutely crashed (I'd say down by about 40%). Does anybody know if this type of thing is normal after a re-design? It's very depressing to see my earnings drop so much.
The Adsense is most likely only affected by the redesign, & not by the newly set up redirects. Looks like he put the ads on a less hotter zone, as opposed to where they used to be placed?
Yes, the ads are now on the right hand side (on about 80% of the pages), they used to be on the left. I had kind of hoped the re-design had just confused Google temporarily. I can't live with such a big drop in the long term.
Unfortunately, left-side ads do better than ones placed on the right side of our screen. The left sidebar is a hotter zone, & users tend to click more in that area. Study the heat map. The darker the color = the hotter the zone: http://www.google.com/images/adsense/en_us/support/general_en.jpg The new ad placement explains your sudden drop in revenue.
Thanks Love. It's not just that that's dropped but my Chitika too, which ironically is now on the left hand side. I did ask the designer to try swapping the AS around but he said it would bugger up the search field or something, but I can't take this huge drop in revenue. I just wanted to know if it had occurred with anybody else after a revamp. As I said, my traffic is also down by 10%. I've worked for years on this site & it's so frustrating to now go backwards.
Basically, a redesign can go eitherway, increase or drop revenue. Good redesigns increase revenue. Bad ones drop it. The words "good" & "bad" are not used to describe the new look of the site, but mostly as a whole (which includes ad placement, blending, etc). If you do really well with a redesign, you'll see an increase in CTR and this will reflect your revenue. From past experience, I have increased 50% in revenue (CTR) after a redesign (a much-needed one too). Adsense ads can't really tell if you changed your site's look (so they won't drop in revenue just because of a redesign). Unless you now have different content from a whole different niche, that is the only time your ads/revenue would get affected as your ads would now start serving different kinds of ads from the ones they used to.
This guy has worked so hard on the site, it was a real labour of love for him. I feel just as bad for him as I do myself. I'll have to ask him to move the ads to the left hand side, see if that picks things up. Thanks again Love. I appreciate your input. A 50% increase is a great achievement, I'd be very happy with that. Looking at my CTR (I don't think we are allowed to give actual stats), it's down by 1/3rd today. Ouch. I was getting more clicks in 2006, and had way less content on the site...
Yes, that does tend to happen sometimes, we just need to thrive in order to maintain or increase what we used to make before a redesign. Always keep in mind the best ad placements if you aim to keep, or do better, with your ads. Attractive-looking ads could help tons too, aside from ad placement.
The colors of your ads, of course. If they were attractive, and attention-grabbing, that could help a lot (as opposed to them just looking like ads).
Oh okay. Thanks I think he just aimed to have them blend in with the site. I will have to chat with him later about our next move.