Things are good. Traffic has perhaps doubled as search terms are increasingly finding my page. And things are bad. Adsense revenue has dropped to almost nothing over the last week. CTR, which for the first 2 months, was around 3% has plummeted to almost 0. I surfed around but didn't find much on this subject. Why might this be happening? Should I post a link to the site so you guys can give input?
Yes you should, because I have only two ideas for CTR so low: - audience too internet savvy - horrible ad placement
healthlifeandstuff.com/2009/07/vyvanse-vs-adderall-simple-vs-complex/ (sorry for the long link) That's my most popular post. It's seen daily by a lot of people who search for phrases like vyvanse compared to adderall, and until this week had a decent CTR. But now no one clicks on its ads. What gives? Sigh.
Well, it could be that a good advertizer, right on the spot, stopped advertizing. Could be that. Now, your ad placement is not optimized, for me it is not even OK. Here's what I would do, you can remove some things because I admit I'm extreme in that I want to use adsense to its full potential, some people don't want that: - on the right column, the first thing should be your adsense block, the one lost after "recent posts" but set the background and border color the same grey as your column background color, not white. - on the content column, I would transform the 468x60 into a full 336x280 - on the content column still, I would transform the 468x60 at the end of the article by setting it to stick on the left, not centered, changing it size to 336x280 once again and change the link color to red. - now I'm not giving details, but I would also add adlink blocks (3) and adsense search (1 at the top, 1 at the bottom) And that's it.
Thanks for the ideas! They make sense, especially changing the block on the right. I just wish I could keep the CTR I was getting. My main concern is that making the ads bigger would detract from the readers experience. I'm definitely not milking it for as much money as I can, but I want my blog to be user friendly. **Wouldn't making the ads on the bottom red violate the TOS because they aren't any different from the current links?
do as you wish, but I don't think 336x280 at the top of the content is not user friendly. As for the links, you have links, then a sentence in black, then ads in red, so that's fine. if it was links then ads in red, I would say it's borderline.
Hi David, first of all, awesome blog - a real pleasure to go "through it", even without being interested in the specific niche, other than the marketing/quality/seo aspect. I agree with most of what SENCERELY already stated above, (it's for sure worth a trial, if that doesn't affect your CTR positive you can always change back to your original placement) but there might be a simple, silly other reason for those changes. I have been observing correlations between Adsense results and SERP positions, keyword specified, for 6 years now and can see those effects not with frequency, but periodically caused by algo chances and the position of your site in the SERPS. This of cause, could only be a possible reason if your visitors are coming mainly from Google and I never saw it lasting longer than a day or two.
SENSERELY: Thanks for the advice! No joke, within two hours of making that change, ads were being clicked on again at decent rates. I'm happy again because while small, the income from the site gives me a cushion of air to pay the bills and invest in its development. Now I'm tempted to follow the rest of your advice ;-) monfis: Thanks for the kind words. Running this website has taught me a lot about keyword targeting, link building, and online marketing. One basic strategy for growth I've developed is a) research keywords to find what people are searching and pick a target that isn't too hard but isn't too small either b) write a high quality article targeting one of those keywords - that is linkable! c) then promote it. It's a hell of a lot of work, though!
Been hearing about the same thing been happening to quite a few Adsense publishers nowadays. Can't understand why though. Why would CTRs plunge so quickly, over such a short period of time? Are your visitors repeat ones? Or are they new traffic? Have you changed anything at all recently on your site? A plunge from a healthy 3% to almost nothing is unusual especially if you are getting a high volume of traffic. You need to eliminate a factor that you have changed over the last 2 months, step by step and find out what is responsible.