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 with my CTR in the range of 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.
I understand where you are coming from mate, I had the same problem with one of my sites. Keep playing wiht the design and colours, you will find the right balance. If it is your first site, just get it looking nice, and concentrate on traffic, not CTR etc. However, I have found with adsense, 'Ugly Sells'. If your site looks a bit crappy, with semi decent ad placement, you'll get a good number of clicks. Good luck with it DD
People going to your site don't care what it looks like. If you have good information and good content they will continue to "hang out" at your site. I have a singer website which gets constant traffic.. I get more unique traffic than repeat visitors, so, once they get what they want from my site, they will leave normally by clicking an ad. Don't worry about cleanliness, just about content. Good Luck!
just keep testing and testing until you find the right balance, don't be afraid to play around with your design and layout
I disagree with factchecker who said "People going to your site don't care what it looks like." A higher CTR when you have a big fat adsense block on the homepage may actually be because your visitors are no longer reading your content and going straight off to the ads. Did your 'page views per visit' drop when you added the adblock?
No, In fact my page views is always steady, the ads displayed on my site are pretty much related and from around 70 uniques a day I get no more than 4 clicks. here is the site i mentioned before www.cyndilaupersite.com if you want to leave your feedback please do so! Thanks again,
I just noticed a double posting for this topic, i am sorry about that guys! It was unintentional and i don't know how to delete the second one.
if you think your ad will compromise your traffic, maybe you should go with the policy of traffic first and then play about with ads. Afterall, traffic equals clicks.
I believe that good content matters over everything. However I would seriously watch out for copyright violation. A singer may not want you to use his or her name and may file a law suit against you if they feel that you are making money off of there name. Plenty of sites have been taken down in support of official fan sites if you know what I mean so watch out please.
It's all about balance. Try to match your sites content formatting to match adsense placement, font colour,(eh?) size are all very important in my experience. Size matters. As well as where you put it Put it this way, I literally make 10 times more with my plain text, heavy content/keyword site compared with my first, graphic heavy site. Build sites for Googlebot first, and the user second Best advice: find that niche, build a finely tuned site around that k/w