My first thought is ditch the image ads - they are awful. Add a link unit to every page throughout the entire site Get rid of image ads (oh, did I say that already?) If I click on a category, there is no title or SEO on each page... specific categories might bring better ads. I wonder how many clicks you are getting? To be honest if I landed on this page I would leave immediately as it looks like a spam site
i dont like the image ads either. im not getting many adsense clicks,..but for the site overall ive gotten more traffic than ever, and the duration time is constantly improving. so i might just ditch adsense all together. thanks for the input, seriously.
Ok a few thing that will help, first of all, use text adverts instead of images, people are almost trained not to see an image advert. - Move you're 728x90 banners to make them seem apart of the content, not an advert. - Move the 468x60 banners into where the links are on link pages. - Although you said you don't want to put a link bar in, do it, you'll earn more money, and put it near the top. - Make sure the adverts look apart of the content, rather than seperated so remove anything that says sponsered listings. - Make sure you don't use borders on your adverts, regardless if they are the google ones or ones you've impletemented. - Get rid of the huge 160x600 banner, place some small content in it, like news, new links, a mini navagation bar, top ten most clicked links, etc, then place a text advert in between. - Add titles to all your pages and more keywords for adsense to pick up on. - Add actual headers to each page, eg: <h1>Jewelry</h1> - Do a spell check through your site, for example http://www.mydentify.com/Shopping/Jewlrey/ you spelt jewelry wrong. - Last thing in case you didn't know, compared with text ads, images pay awful cpm through adsense. Hope that all Helps
One last thing . . . . . don't ditch adsense, you can easily improve it. Else if the tips that every one given you doesn't help, buy a book: The Adsense Code by Joel Comm
Took a look at your site. Actually I am not surprised by the low earnings, I am surprised by the stats you gave. That sounds incorrect, a normal PR 4 directory without any real content should be getting much lesser trtaffic. Are you sure you are not buying traffic from anywhere? You may want to add g. analytics and make sure that the stats are correct. I know you might laugh at this, but what you said sounds unlikely, from my expreience. Now, coming back to adsense, I will suggest to change your ad placement and ad type. 1. Ads at the header never really gets any hits. Especially if your traffic is mostly webmasters. Get it close to the content. Change the placemtn in home page. 2. Dont select inage only. google_ad_type = "image"; That must be both text/image. For almost any position, text works a lot better. 3. On internal pages, under Sponsored Links use the large rectangle and make it look as close to your regular directory listings as possible. Removing the ad on header also will help to increase the Cost per click of the ads near content. Now your top paying ads are the headers, which no one clicks. It will be better to have just one ad unit per page and make it come at the center of the page, above fold. If you follow this, I am sure your earnigns will increase by 3-4 times(Have done it for a client).
You can try monetizing your impressions with CPM networks. You can probably earn with them more than $1 a day. You could experiment with 336x280 ads on category pages, put the same blue background color like your listings. (EDIT: sorry alemcherry, I posted only seconds after you )
Facts about image ads from my experience: 1. people don't click image ads much. I had Quite low CTR with image ads. 2.I had quite low PPC for image ads. My opinions to improve your sites CTR: 1. Try link ads 2. Do not use image ad. Particularly the image ad which is used at the top, just looks like a banner. So nobody is gonna click that ad 3. Use square box ads. They are also performing quite well for me. Now my questions are, 1. Is CTR low or the PPC is low? 2. Which one you wanna improve first?
im using 1and1 and also google analytics for stats and yes they are reading the same ~10k a day.and im paying 0$ for traffic. thanks for the suggestions
thanks for the suggestions. well...my other site gets about $0.80 - $1.00+ a click but its a niche site. for this site both CTR and PPC are low...i need to figure out on what to improve first...
OMG...10K impressions and <$1 . Sounds pathetic. Well besides listening to the suggestions of DP members on this thread, you should check out this thread as well: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=245061
http://www.revitalizingpixels.com/resources/v3/conferences.html This page does rather well on my adsense earnings.