CTR Under 1% -- Any advice?

URL: http://fakesend.com/

My CTR is absurdly low, not even 1%.

Does anyone have any advice on how to get my CTR a little higher on the above URL?

Thanks in advance for any replies,

Andy

 

You could try putting 300x250 or 250x250 block under the title, floating left of the text

 

its hard to manipulate CTR..nice ad placment though

 

Yes, you can try larger size ads and horizontal ads on the top of the fold. If that does not improve, you have to just live with the low CTR and try to drive more traffic to make up for the low CTR.

 

To me it looks like a good ad placement, maybe you have already optimized. The big rectangle ads seem to work the best so you might want to throw one in your content (floating left for example with text around). Otherwise it might be because you have TOO much banners that you have a low CTR. As surprising as it might seem, if people realize you're only after their clicks they won't click. Psychology.

 

How about placing the link units on the top of the blog
any suggestion you can give to this blog
http://dating-love-relationships-romance.blogspot.com/

 

Absolutely - your placement is good but your size/format choice is poor. You should be using a larger block there (such as 300x250 or 336x280). Right now your users are ignoring that small ad.

 

As said, use the rectangles. They get you the highest CTR. Also try placing them at different positions with different colors.

 

I dropped the useless ad between my text and the forms, and am going to add a rectange above the fold inline with the font, after testing it a few days with the smaller ad, thats in the same place.

I think the bottom ad near the "Send Email" button is the one making me all my money, since its in very close proximity to where my users have to click, so I'm not going to remove it.

I'll keep you guys updated.

 

So I added a 250x250 Image ad left and fluid with my text on my index page. Decent CTR so far on that ad, can't tell for sure yet. Still under 1% but a better percentage, hahaha.

Any other tips? I didn't like the way the text ads looked fluid with my text, so I went image. Anyone have different experiences with text ads vs. image ads?

 

CTR depends a lot on the content of a site, if the users aren't likely to click on ads then your CTR won't be good no matter how you optimize your site.

 

agreed with gallito, moreover when there is too many placement of ads..its also make a 'contribution' in lowing the CTR...

try remove unnecessary ads units and focused on the heat-map area..
good luck..

 

My advice would first to get your bearings straight. 1% is NOT absurdly low for a sms-site! I think where you have the ads placed is not bad at all, even though I would go with text-ads where you integrate them in flowing text.

 

it may not look as nice as you want it to look but this will work

remove most of the stuff off on the side. Right now the reader automagically puts their attention towards the content block on the page... they aren't even looking to the left at the ads (i wouldn't) So clean up the left side and put a nice sized banner add at the top of your page rather than the link unit.

Move the link unit to the left side but verticle.

add another banner below the content.

 

I usually would try it out, but I'm not a great coder myself (I just hire people to do work), and the sidebar ad actually doesn't perform that poorly. I mean the CTR isn't the greatest, but apart from the unit below the Send button, is the 2nd best performing ad on the site.

I could try removing some ads, I'll see how that works for me.

 

CTR does not depend on the content of the site. It perhaps depends on the ad-relevancy, but not on the content. In fact, it depends on psychological factors (read my previous DP post). Different placements of your advertisements and different colors will get you more money for sure. Try using #000080 as URL color. That helped me greatly.

 

Good ad placement but I'd strongly consider izzportal's suggestion of less of them.