I need some help with the colors and placement and stuff on one of my sites to increase the CTR.. I'm getting a decent ammount of traffic (averaging around 6K impressions per ad unit).. but the CTR is horrible. I can't say how horrible, but its really really bad. The site is www.thevirtualbrowser.com and the adsense is on the top of any page you browse with it (so type in some URL to see the adsense ads) Before I had just one 728x68 banner running where the ads are now.. and that did even worse than my current setup. I changed it to 468x60, and text ads only, and it did better, and then I added the horizontal adlinks and that helped a lot, but the CTR is still really low compared to other sites... This could be just due to the type of site it is.. but I thought I'd ask and see if I can try anything else. The images on top of or beside ads idea sounds nice, but it really wouldn't work here.. at least not in the current position. As that would push the actual content too far down the page. Josh
Have you tried putting images next to the ads one at the right one at the left as proven in another large thread although they were on top of the ads it should still work. I think a bright image would do good as the ads are a bit dull in my opinion. The placement is good, was the first place I looked. I think another big problem is the relevancy of your ads, have you tried to make them more relvant? I don't know how you'd go about that but I got ads for firefox on a different themed site. Overall, I'd make the ads brighter and try to get them more relevant. Try using the same colors as DP uses here (top right) Edit: Also why not make the orange border around the top part of the page wider?
I can't really get the more relevent.. as the I don't really have control of the content on the page. That certainly is a big problem.. you're right. I'll try an image on the side, any idea what it should be of? Josh Edit: Fryman, Was going to.. but I had to move, and was without internet for a month. And during that time, something messed up bigtime with the hosting, and I wasn't there to fix it. So I lost a lot of traffic, and the person wasn't interested anymore.
Josh: I have recently tried this technique learned right here at DP . www . virtuowl . com/ home/ byod . htm Use images with alt tags. Positioned very closely to ads. If you are going to use an image rotator (good idea IMO) make sure it includes alt tags...they seem to have influence on the ads. This may help stabilize your theme .
Exam, yeah.. I need to switch to a better host, but its not bringing in enough revenue to support that Josh
I'd recommend switching now and then working up your revenue to cover the cost. I think you would really want stability if you're going to build up a nice flow of traffic.
Yeah.. It was hosted on the host I admin, but it was having so much traffic that it stressed the server beyond what it could handle, so we moved it to a secondary server that doesn't have a very good net connection. Josh
I've tried the image-above-the-ads trick, and we shall see how it goes. I cant really get any images that are relivent to the site, so I'm just using eye-catching landscapes instead. I also tried just a little icon next to the ads, and that increased the CTR quite a bit. I almost hit $10 yesterday I still have a lot of work to do.. but most of it has to do with the keywords, If I could get 30 cents or so per click I could almost double my daily income. Josh