I own a high traffic network of Wordpress blogs which all run on the same Magazine theme. My two main sources of income are derived via Adsense and Affiliate Offers. I've been having trouble with Adsense for the last few months, as my CTR has rarely risen above 0.6%. Can anyone take a quick look and let me know what I should be changing to drive this rate higher? URL: Black Ops 2 I realise there is only 1 Adsense unit on the main page and I am fully aware this will have a drastic effect on the CTR. However, my issue is that with my current inner page layout, it's difficult to display anymore units on the homepage. (An example of an inner page can be seen here: http://blackops2news.com/call-of-duty-black-ops-2/cod-black-ops-2. Any input would be appreciated. Edit: Just made some tweaks to the homepage, does anyone think this is likely to improve?
A. Your site has a tech audience and those bastards never click on ads. Not much you can do about that one. B. Your ads are all right up the top and your site is really long and people are most likely to read the comments down the bottom, so instead of clustering the ads at the top, put one at the top for casual visitors, one after the first or second comment and one just under the last comment. Basically put your ads as close as possible to the most important content from the visitor's perspective. Also your CTR is 5x higher than mine. Sites that aren't MFA don't have high CTRs. If you want really high CTR, have a site that provides almost-but-not-quite all the information your user wants, don't let the users interact with comments etc, and make sure your niche is something that people are willing to pay for so you'll get ads for related products/services and off you go. Or you could keep doing something that you actually LIKE doing and just try and get the most out of what you have, which in my opinion is a far better idea.
Thanks for the response. In regards to placing an advert perhaps after the last comment, do you know of any existing Wordpress plugins which make this easy to implement? WebDev
First, your ad top right (on the right side of the logo) is not good at all. Because evryone can see that's an ad, because it doesn't implement good with your logo. Change your logo in the way that on the right side of it (where ad is now) is only solid color, and then put an ad there with same background as in the new logo. Second, on that particular inner page you have an issue that is not allowed in Adsense TOS. You have a picture right under the adsense ad links, and on the picture is writing "CLICK HERE". THis is not allowed and you can be easy banned from adsense for this. The best adsense plugin for WP is Quick Adsense.
Thanks for all your tips, I've gone ahead and implemented some already and will test out the rest in the next week or so.
Some improvements, I guess so, but anything satisfactory I don't believe, as RumpledElf pointed it out, the audience is not good for adsense earnings compared to the amount of traffic you can get.
CTR has increased, but it's still under performing significantly in comparison to my other niches. I appreciate all your input. WebDev
Nothing much you can do about. I own several gaming sites and CTR isn't good either. The best performing one was on my minecraft related site but that lasted only about 2-3 weeks. CTR have dropped now and I have no idea why. Seeing that you're using CPMStar, they're already relevant enough for your visitors so that's not an issue but you mentioned adsense in the thread. Did you recently just changed over to cpmstar? And if yes, did CTR increase a lot?