My methods are by no means scientific or accurate... I'm still a bit of a newbie. I'm sure if I had more detailed channels I could avoid something like this... maybe I'll do so when I can organize myself a bit better So in a rather poor attempt to be an 133t Adsense user I thought I'd experiment with some ad placement. I had been doing well with a 125x125 unit on the top of my left sidebar, a 120x90 link unit on the top of my right sidebar, and a 468 text ad unit beneath my first post. Well, the 120 unit was the lowest performer so I decided to remove that and place a 468 link unit all the way at the bottom of my site... I thought it'd be a compromise between having 3 ads on my site and having only 2, which seemed to work for some people here. BOY WAS I WRONG! The first day, my CTR was around 60% of my usual daily CTR. The next day, my CTR was a whopping 9% of my usual CTR!!! This morning I checked my stats and saw that by 9AM, I hadn't generated a single click (I've always had at least 4-5 by this time every day for the last month) so I quickly placed my old ad back in place and removed the new one. I'm happy to report that despite the late start, my daily CTR today is back to normal. I'm by no means a big player like some people here, my modest site is only generating an average of $1 per day... but those two days, TOGETHER, I got less than 50 cents! It just goes to show, you shouldn't mess with a good thing
While it's always a bit scary changing something that is working you will never find the best way unless you try different things You would be singing a different tune if your profits had gone up. If you haven't looked at the google heat map you should. I was averaging about $8 a day on one of my sites and then changed my placement as recommended by the heat map and that site now averages about $30 a day.