CTR below 0.50% visits 3k a day, help!

Please help me, this has been going for a long time now. I have these websites for 2 years now. I have improved on the visits but I barely have clicks.

1st site:

http://www.batasnatin.com is a law website that has abour 2k to 3k unique visits a day. However, the CTR is a measly 0.5%CTR; I only receive about 8 to 10 clicks on average in 1 day. Please help on how to optimize. I have tried several ad positions but to no avail.

2nd site:

http://www.hotelsphilippines.org it is a hotels and travel website. With this one, I have on average 500 UV but almost all the time I never receive a single click.

Please suggest adsense placements that can increase revenues. Thanks a lot and more power!

 

I personally prefer text ads over link units. There's such a thing, I believe, where less is more. Instead of the existing ads on both of your sites, I would use two 300X250 and one 160X600 text ads on each page.

 

Thanks for the reply. I implemented this kind of placement in the inner pages but still the results are the same

 

Try NOT to blend them too much. I've noticed the color of the links within the ads is a bit pale. Try this color: #004299

 

@vitalbusiness thanks, i will try your color.

 

Also you might want to consider alternating the ads between text ads and image ads, it might help your CTR.

 

Thanks! I will also implement this one on the hotels website. Based on your experience, what is better, image first beside the text or text then image?

 

I would suggest text then image..though not to close so that it violates adsense ToS

 

change place to put your ads

 

Thanks for all the suggestions. I already implemented them on the sites. I will be updating you guys if it worked. If you have more suggestions please post, it really is big help.

 

Where do you suggest?

 

Are you getting ads that are even vaguely relevant?

I always have very low CTR across several sites, I dragged one up from 0.01 to 0.4 by spending far more time than necessary blocking specific ads (one by one) that were totally irrelevant to the site. I also added the google tags to ignore sections of the page that had keywords with more than one meaning. In my case, the worst keyword was "cards", on a page where I have some free e-cards, but instead of getting other ads for cards or stationary or anything USEFUL I was getting ads for credit cards and debt consolidation. When I put in the ignore tags the ads actually got relevant and the CTR went up.

 

Thanks for the advice. I have a job site and sometimes I do not get relevant results on it. How do I create the ignore tags?

 

I think you can filter ads in the Competitive Ad Filter under the Adsense Setup tab.

 

Competitive Ad Filter isn't the same - I had no idea these tags existed until I stumbled on them in the Google forums.

This was the ONLY thing I found stopped one of my sites from getting credit card ads because of some dual-meaning keywords. It was too hard to block individual ads and I couldn't remove the keywords because it would stop the site making sense. The credit card ads obviously were bidding higher for that keyword than relevant ads were.

 

Oh, thanks for sharing. Will we put this inside the body tag too? This part "Part of your website you want to ignore goes here" is not clear to me.

Update on my websites' adsesnse performance:

No significant change on CTR . I can't understand why when more than 80% of my traffic if from SEs

 

Its a html tag on its own, you can't nest them.

I have it around some entries in my sites main menu (so wrapped around <a> tags) and around the same keywords in the main body text.

 

I think with all the suggestions and research I have come up with the final design and ad placements. There was just a very little addition to the CTR- about 1 or 2 more everyday. I guess I can't do much about it, I need to drive more traffic.

 

Still no discernible change in CTR? Try adding infolinks for additional revenue.