[Case Study] How I Tripled my Adsense CTR and Earnings on my New Site

Are you using your custom made cms?

 

Sexy Wear
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=sexy+wear&btnG=Search&meta=

Cocktails
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=cocktails&btnG=Google+Search&meta=


I see adwords campaigns. I dont see reason why people wouldnt use adsense as a tool for presenting adwords campaigns even in this areas?

 

i agree. a 3 col layout helps, so does a text-based, fast loading website. i like the use of the image next to your main ad on the landing page of the site. so whether 2 ads show up or 3, it looks uniform.. one big long image. nice.

 

Yeah, you definately got your ass handed to you on Digg, but it still made the front page.
Certainly you got some income from it that you would not have gotten had it not been there.
As little as those visitors click ads, a small percentage is better than no percentage.

How much traffic did the Digg effect bring, as I see it was actually linked to another forum which would require them to read and find your link?

 

Wow-- those Digg responses are brutal! I'd be worried that Google would ban me with that many people saying they've reported you as spam.

I don't think they will ban you for the cocktails recipe site though.

 

Agreed. Plus, he admits his traffic is nil and "not worth his time". I don't see how you can come to a solid conclusion about anything, in particular Adsense ad placements, with traffic so low it's not even worth your time to work on the site.

 

great stuff.
it's good to be 'bad-ass PHP whiz'.

 

lol let's answer everything

- Busted! I have received about 3000 uniques since I made the changes, I agree it's not a lot of people but I generally consider figures like that statistically useful, I might get back when I've checked about 10k, all the "triple your adsense" is obviously hype stuff that I used to make it to the digg homepage (digg users dig all the "how to blabla" stuff), and apparently it served its purpose. Besides, saying "multiply your adsense revenue by 2.85637%" didn't sound as good

- The story stayed on digg's homepage for a few hours (not many though), it brought in about 1200 uniques, (converted a bit lower than normal traffic)
I know digg users are VERY annoying, I sometimes imagine them running around their house with a knife, shouting "SPAM SPAM, I BAN YOU..BASTARD!" at everything they read, but I don't really care as long as they bring in some residual income

- I'm not really worried about the alcohol issue,since there are many websites about alcohol and cocktails that are using adsense (e.g. http://www.drinkboy.com/ ), G generally cares about the "family friendly"ness of websites, and mine is more like a reference website than something that encourages to drink. Then again, I've been contacted by google in the past because I had a page that had jokes about black people (nothing offensive mind you), so they don't ban you right away, they usually just ask to remove that page or the ads

- The site was 100% coded by me (css,html,php,javascript...I made the images with the gimp and some stock photos, I suck at graphics though), not really a CMS tho since it lacks an admin panel, I just entered the data in the DB and wrote some php to display it. But it does use a set of very handy php OOP libraries, I might write a tutorial about it some day..It's basically a modular class that creates the page taking care of all the parameters, it really makes coding MUCH MUCH faster (if you don't already use OOP, do it, I'd never go back to procedural coding..) I basically write $page->css('/s.css'); $page->use_cache=1; $page->cache_time=86400; $page->use_db=1; etc and it automatically prints out the html and headers in the correct way (so you skip all the debugging for css, js and html, a great time saver), checks if the file has been cached (uses phpcache), loads the database configuration file and all that everyday stuff

In fact I'm spending most of my time writing reusable and completely self-contained classes, like a class for pagination, one for login/logout, one for internal search engines, one for forms etc

I'm aware of pear but I don't quite like their classes, in my opinion code is good when you can't trim it any more, and PEAR classes are usually not self contained and bloated with useless junk
Writing your own classes is always the best option since it's perfectly tailored to your needs and you can avoid all useless code

 

If you are not worried about the alcohol on your site, I suggest you e-mail google and ask them to give their stamp of approval. Just ask them if it is okay to have drink recipes on a site with adsense.

If they say yes, you have nothing to worry about. If they say no, you can react appropriately. Sitting there and hoping they don't find out or don't care is not a sound business strategy at all.

I know for example you can't have links to a site that have sports odds on them. Sure you can find plenty of sites that do have them, but that does not mean they are condoned. It just means they have not been caught yet.

It is up to you if you feel like taking the gamble. To me it is a stupid risk to take as it is easy to find out the answer.

 

I find it funny that Google would have a problem with your site since they themselves have ads dealing with alcohol

gasmonso

 

I would follow aeiouy advice. Agree with him 100%

 

i just love the ads placement.....
thx for the lesson....