Hi guys, As you see this is my first posting here. I've been reading the topics for a couple months and now I think it is about time to start sharing my ideas. I have created a fan site for an american singer, which I belive was well designed and my CTR was around 1.5%. So I decided to put on the first page an ad block and for my surprise the CTR went up to 4%. The problem here is that even though i was making more "money" anything between .80 to 1.20 cents (LOL!) a day i was not happy with the overall look of my site after the ad was inserted on the front page . In my opnion the ad destroyed the clean designed of the site, made it look cheaper and unprofessional so I took it down and my CTR dropped again to between .0.6% to 1.5%. So what you guys think about it? What comes first for you when building a new site? My point here is that I want to build a good sites, with a professional look (although I am not a professional) and make some extra income with adsense but I am not sure how to find the right balance between ad placement customization without affecting the design.
It depends on you.. What do you think is more important?? your clean webdesign.. or making money you have to answer that question, and than you have the solution
Forget about adsense in first place. Make site you and your visitors will like, get a lot of traffic, and only then consider to get money from it.
Design is not the priority for me.. content it is I would focus on creating valuable content for the visitors.
I removed most of the adsense from my sites cause it made my site look ugly as well. im building traffic right now on most of them. -tim
Yeah, it's up to you. You have to decide why you're working on the site in the first place. If the answer is money, go for it. If not, then you'll have to think a little harder.
yes it will make your site look ugly, perhaps blending it with the surroundings , colour scheme might help a little.
I guess at the end of the day it comes down to what you made the site for in the first place, money or to share your knowledge. I have nothing against people that are providing a good quality information service and at the same time want to generate some solid income. That said more often than I think you will find that when people focus on providing good quality information or a service with that comes increased traffic as people begin to market you website for you by telling their finds or linking to your site from their own. If you are overly aggressive with your monetization people will be a lot less likely to be spreading the word about your site or linking to it - because they perceive that you are only in it for the money. So in the long run it may well be worth your time not spamming your site up with too many ads, plus if you are only talking about the different of $2 a day, basically you are trading the potentially bright future of a site for $2/day. If it was a $20/day or $200/day difference then you might be more inclined to go with the more advertising - but for small figures I'd suggest just focusing on building a quality site rather than trying to squeeze the extra couple of cents out of it. But then again I'd say as far as integrating ads into a site goes you can't get much better than Google AdSense - they have a range of options and you can blend the ads in for not only a increased CTR but without taking too much attention away from the primary purpose of the site. So maybe the answer is just to find an ad unit that fits in better on the homepage.