[Case Study] How I Tripled my Adsense CTR and Earnings on my New Site

I'd like to share with you what has worked to increase adsense income for me

I've just launched a very simple site about cocktails
It provides recipes for a number of cocktails

Let's start with the basics to have a good-performing website:

1. Fast Loading - I'm a bit of a performance freak, if you have a look at this you'll see the site weighs only 21k, images and adsense code included. The pages are also cached via php, plus they send customized cache http headers. This is important, since if a user leaves your site because it's too slow, that's it, you've lost him.
2. Simple design - Simpler means faster, but please note that simpler also means less confusion for the user -> they will click your ads more. I'm actually not very happy with the 3 col layout, because my tests prove that 2-column layouts are even simpler, and lead to generally higher CTR. Overloading your page with columns, rss feeds, banners etc just confuses the user, and you have to make up for the confusion by adding more ad units, bloating your code, loading time, and generating even more confusion. Keep it simple stupid!
3. Browser Compatibility, Internationalization - I won't go in the usual CSS "holier than thou" crap, just make sure your page works well in firefox and IE (=99% of users), and bear in mind that not all users are US. In my site, for example, ingredients are given in OZ, but europeans use LITERS, so I created a fast javascript converter -> boom, my site is now useful to europeans too! (Yes, smarty, I know that OZ is a measure for weight, and liters is for volume. But europeans don't "weigh" they vodkas, they use liters, and we can assume 1 liter roughly equals 1 kg, possibly less since alcohol has a lower density than water )

These are just the basics for creating a new website, I always use these rules while developing new websites, and I've achieved consistently good results with them

Let's go into detail for the CTR:

Before:
You can see how my site was by looking at Google's cache:
site about cocktails

Highlights:

• The page featured a large rectangle with an image, in the center. You might think it worked well, but in fact it only averaged a CTR of 1-1.5%
• There were 2 small adsense ads at the bottom of the ingredients and instructions. They had a good ctr, but let's see if we can improve it: the links do not blend very well with the rest of the text, they have a different font, a different color etc
• The site's links are NOT underlined, google's are. This creates confusion and makes the ads stand out
• The site's font is VERDANA (which, btw is the best font for legibility etc, I never use sub-optimal stuff, not even fonts ), but google's is Arial 12px, this makes the ads stand out
• Just a reminder: ads standing out are a big no-no, your ads should be as blended as possible with the rest of the site

After:
Here's how my cocktail recipes website looks now

• I have removed the large rectangle and switched the 3rd ad unit to a small one (they were performing better)
• I've changed all the fonts in the central column to arial 12px (the same as google's), now the ads blend very well!
• I've changed all the links in the website to have an underline, so they're now very similar to google's ads
• If you're smart you'll notice one thing: my ingredients have a list-marker (a tick or a small arrow) but google ads don't. Putting a marker would surely increase CTR, but it would be in the "grey area" of optimizations, possibly pushing my TOS compliance, so I just decided to drop this idea
• Goodie - since I'm pulling ingredients etc from a database (and since I'm a bad-ass PHP whiz, and modest too. J/K, this is easy stuff ) I took a step further to ensure the death of banner blindness: I put all the list items (including google's ads) in an array, then I mixed it's values. Result: google's ads can be at the top, center or bottom of the list, completely random, for every cocktail. Try looking at other cocktails to see what I mean (PS don't reload the same cocktail, the page is cached for 10 days so ads will stay in the same position, for the same page, in 10 days)

Result: My CTR has more than tripled with just 10 minutes of work (I won't disclose the exact CTR amount to comply with google's TOS)

Please note that I could probably increase the CTR further by using a 2-col layout, but since this website is new, has no pagerank and very few visitors it isn't worth the hassle, for me, to redesign it. That's why from now on I'll only use 2-col layouts (they also comply with my performance mania, 1 less column means less code )

If you have any suggestions I'm open!

PS. try clicking in the "send to friend" text field, it should fade from yellow to white. Could you tell me if this works in your browsers? just testing a new css trick

PPS if you liked my article help me by digging my story! http://digg.com/programming/%5BHOW_TO%5DHow_to_Triple_your_Adsense_Earnings_(by_improving_your_CTR)

 

Darn, this is interesting stuff! Thanks for sharing! Some observations:

IMHO cache http headers don't work at all in IE. This was invented and used to work in Netscape' browser Navigator but no go in IE. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Hmmm, why don't you just get rid of the list markers? That way you could align the Adsense code with the ingredients or Ingredient Ratios more and it will surely increase your CTR even more; IMHO...

You owe me 2 cents now!

 

Nice. On the new version, you hardly even know it's an ad!!! I like the way Google tries to hide the 'Ads by Spamoooooogle.' It helps us!!!

 

Hey reginald thanks for the tips

1. As far as I know, only some cache headers were made for netscape, but if you use a combination of "cache-control: max-age" and "expires" it should work, or at least be formally valid, in all browsers
For instance, this is the header from one of my pages
"Cache-Control: max-age=864000, must-revalidate
Expires: Tue, 04 Jul 2006 12:46:32 GMT"
I'm pretty sure it also works in IE and firefox

2. I could remove the list markers but then it would be more difficult to read, and those cute soft icons are soooo addictive! I just keep them to give some personality to the site but theoretically yes, they should improve ctr! I didn't really test this however

 

Awesome site! Thanks for posting your thoughts and detailed changes to made to increase your CTR. Did you develop the database of recipes yourself?

One thought that came to mind is to add Amazon items to the pages (relavent items of course) that would go with the recipes or standard bar/kitchen items.

Again, great job! Please keep us posted on your progress.

John

 

I thought Google did not allow Adsense ads on any alcohol related sites?

 

First I had heard that, Darrell, unless you can point to it in the TOS?

 

Now it says promotion of alcohol or beer. You might argue that recipes do not do that. I know from past experience on slightly grey areas google tends to side on the side of no, so I suspect they would say no in this case too, if you asked them.

 

good site and good information best of luck but i would refer to ask google to get permission to add adsense on this site..

 

Interesting that when I loaded your new version of your page, I was like it looks nice but where are the ads. Then I looked closer to see them within the top middle. Interesting way to eliminate banner blindness. I have to remember that for my sites. I always seem to like sites that look nice, but those designs dont work well for adsense.

 

Your site is very informative, now the next step for me; become the legal age to drink. 5 more years to go.

 

Content is almost nil. Where's the content?

 

Kendothpro

Wouldnt it work better if the ad was right after the end of Ingredients and Ingredient Ratios (1 pers.) - like Preparation?

Visitors would think it was another recipe and click it.

Interesting

 

Good post, I strongly beleive in simple designed and low loading times websites. One of my sites that has an extremly fast loading time, very few images (logo only) and a pure CSS design gets an average CTR in the 20s. Great post

 

I'd like to test that, that's one of the reasons why I left it like that in the preparation (the other reason being that I cannot mix the preparation steps since they're in a precise chronological order and I would have to code a slightly more difficult logic)

My guess is that eventually visitors may learn that the last item in the list is an ad, and stop clicking it. If it changes with every page it's more difficult to spot though, and visitor's eyes will probably stumble upon it much more frequently when it's in the middle rather than at the end..just a guess though!

 

Yep, 20% CTR is definitely achievable, although I've been able to do that only with 2-col very simple layouts!

I'm guessing your site is a 2-col too?

 

Great post! lots of good info!

 

A little bit short to conclude that your income has tripled.
Report back after 1 month.

 

Just reading aeiouy's post and I think Adsense would not allow this site as well. I have a cigar review site that does not sell or promote cigars, just has user reviews and Adsense said no. Although the cocktail site does not sell or promote alcohol, I think it is aginst Google's TOS.

 

Informative Post. But people gave some horrible comments on the digg article refering the site as "spam".