Horizontal Ad Links - Where's the Clicks???

This is NOT a solicitation for clicks. Please do NOT click the ads.
I always like to see concrete examples, so I am going to stick my neck out.

The three pages in my sig get very good traffic, relatively speaking, for me.
But the horizontal adlinks seem to be invisible. Clicks are almost non-existant. I have worked hard to get my CTR up on all my other pages, and have had good success. But I can't figure out why these 3 pages have such a low CTR.
My thoughts -
1. Subject matter - sophisticated visitors just don't click?
2. Questions are answered - no reason to click?
3. Poor targeting, i.e., no SEO ads on SEO pages?

Can anyone suggest what they think what the problem might be?

There you have it - THREE poor performing horizontal ad links pages for the price of one!

It is important to note that these 3 pages ALSO performed very poorly with normal adsense ads - large rectangle, blended in, top of page, etc. So maybe it is a subject matter that simply doesn't get many clicks. I would love to hear your opinion. Thanks in advance.

 

Try placing a 768/w adlinks box bellow the "Google Data Centers List". You might also try adding a css border to seperate the ads from the rest of the page. My view just kinda skipped past the adlinks right to the content.

I.e.

<div style="border:1px dotted #0066FF; padding-left:10px; padding-right:10px;">
[[adsense code]]
</div>

You might also want to work on a little more of a design, because right now the colors aren't very pretty.. and its bascially all content and no design/format. If you had more of a design, you might be able to put adsense in a location thats better. (No offense meant.. just throwing my idea out there )


Josh

 

Your target audience is webmasters, who generally don't click ads. For me, even if I found an ad interesting I would never click it but type it in manually, I use Adsense and recognise and avoid clicking such ads (for obvious reasons).

Your central tables really stand out and actually draw my attention which is taking my field of vision away from the ads.

I think if the site was aimed at a different audience it would have a lot better CTR than it does now, but even then the central content draws the eye, which in most cases would be good and in your case would be good if the ads were there.

Just my 2 cents

 

This has been experience. My non-techie web site gets over double the CTR of my tech web sites.

 

Josh - just what I wanted to hear - I'm an old dude, I can take it. Could you elaborate just a bit on what you mean by "design". Add graphics? Change colors to lighter, darker, more contrasty, more pleasing? I like pastels, should I change that? By 768, did you mean 468 or 728 horizontal line? I just moved the ad links on all 3 pages to the top, as you suggested, under the title.

I definitely prefer the 4 adlinks, because the font is larger than for the 5 links. I think the fonts are a little too small. Also, the 4-links are more descriptive, since there is more room for the text.

The format is simple, because I am simple! I'm not a programmer, and I barely manage to play around with the HTML. Never used the "div" - going to check it out today.

dct - Agree! I too don't click, after receiving extensive paranoia training from the Adsense folks. I type it in.

tlainevool - Agree! Wrong audience. Webmasters ain't big clickers!

ALL 3 pages are about SEO, yet I get ZERO SEO ads. SEO ads are the one type of ads that webmasters might click on. Any suggestions on how I might remedy this? Would seo in the file name make a difference?

Thanks for the inputs, guys.

 

Try going to www.oswd.org and looking at some of the basic designs there.. you might find one that you like that could spruce the site up a little more.

You could add some graphics, but I mean just generally you don't have much of a layout. Yeah, I meant 728 horizontal line, I can't type


Josh

 

Many thanks Josh.

I couldn't get the look I wanted with the div, so I went with a table, to give me a white background for the ads to make them stand out. The ad links are pretty much in-your-face now. I'm anxious to see how this works.

Now if I could just get some seo ads, but that's another story.

Meanwhile, I'm going to check out those design suggestions.

 

Do you mean that you don't click on other people's ads? Why not? You don't want to support other webmasters?

 

Clicking on ads isn't supposed to be something to support the webmasters. Its supposed to drive traffic to the advertisers sites.. just clicking the ads without a genuine interest actually costs advertisers more, and they will stop using adsense and move to something else.. and that will actually cost webmasters.

Surf_dude,
For SEO ads to come up, why don't you add a paragraph or two at the top of the page detailing how you can use this data for search engine optomization.

Josh

 

But he said he wouldn't click on them even if he did find it interesting. If you have genuine interest in it, go ahead and click. I don't see why you would enter it manually.

 

If I get in the habit of clicking on Adsense ads, I will get careless and click on my own ads. I ALREADY have clicked on my own ads on 3 occasions, and I reported them all to Adsense support. In each case, they thanked me, and told me to straighten up.

When someone is pulling down substantial bucks, they are not about to jeopardize that income by effing around. I know very well that I am not alone in this. Get sloppy and get kicked? NO WAY!

Zero tolerance works for me.

 

That makes some sense and isn't something I've thought of before. Thanks for clueing me in.

 

I thought that I would bump this just once, to follow-up on my success, with horizontal Ad Links on the 3 pages in my sig.
I took Josh's suggestions, tried a few other things, and my CTR was zilch.
So I pulled the massive boat anchors from all three pages.

What I feel that I have learned is this -
1. As stated above, "techie" web pages generally have a low CTR. AdSense or Ad Links, it doesn't matter.

2. Webmasters, as a group, are the louziest clickers of all. Many probably have invalid click paranoia, just like me.

3. Certain high paying keyword ads are VERY difficult to get to show up (SEO), even though the page is unquestionably 100% about the topic, with tons of content. Check it out, see what you think. I believe that you need HIGH PR to get those ads (or some secret sauce, which I haven't found yet). My site PR4 doesn't cut it.

4. When the best targeted ads are not served, of course the CTR will be lousy. Dump the pages.

5. I get the added benefit of testing out the theory that high site CTR = high EPC. I got a lot of visits to those 3 pages. My CTR has gone up, shall we say, a lot, since I dropped the ads altogether from the pages. If a page only gets a few impressions, then the CTR doesn't matter. But if it gets a lot of impressions, RELATIVE to your TOTAL site impressions, and NO clicks, then it drags your overall CTR down like a boat anchor. Does overall site CTR determine the EPC on your individual pages? I think so. That's the way I would program it - the best producers should get the best payout. We shall see. I need to re-do my CTR vs. eCPM graph - it's off the top. Already.