Hi guys, I'm getting roughly 100 to 300 hits a day on my website which is targeted towards a certain hobby niche. I snagged a URL pertaining to this hobby's future announcement a week in advance of said announcement and now I'm seeing a small, steady flow of traffic from it. I've been advertising the website on this hobby's related forums and also on Twitter to the applicable crowd. However, I find myself having a problem with obtaining a decent amount of clicks. On a good day, I'll get all of four to five clicks. I don't think it's my ad placement or anything that's been going wrong. Any idea what I can do? I don't want to give out the link though =P
That's usual for all of us except a few. I found there is no hard and fast rule that works well. Sometime a sustainable unique and CTR & earnings while again in and often we see no prosperity. We have to keep on trying. I did every possible avenue to be unturned, including PPC ads, I incurred loss only loss! I do not know how others claiming huge amount of earnings? Yes, I would appreciate insights from all experts openly without harming yourself, please. Where do we make mistake? Content! I regularly write that on theme based, but alas! no improvement. Of course a lot of competition looming around.
Click through rate depends on a number of factors: Your niche (some just wont give you hardly any clicks, no matter how hard you try) Ad placement Ad colours and traffic The easy things to try are changing the ads, but be aware of Google TOS else you'll be banned. Then try and increase your traffic. If this dont work then try another niche I'm afraid.
Google has several examples of improving CTR. Where should I place Google ads on my pages? http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=17954 What colour palettes are the most successful? http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=17957 Emphasise important content with section targeting. http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=43872 However looking at your site it is not the CTR you need to improve it is the number of visitors.
I will advice you read more about improving CTR on google. I may not be able to tell you why it is so.
Check what keywords your using. The ads showing on your site may have no relevance to your sites content....
You should try to improve your CTR via trying different ad units. Try different ad units like, 336*280 or 250*250 etc, and put them in different ad placements. Try different combinations of ad units and ad placements to see which one gives you the best CTR.
The only thing that needs to be done to improve your CTR is positioning. Position your ads correctly where people will click them
You will want to check out our blog post about the best AdSense colors. It's all about the traffic, placements and colors.
With my experience, CTR very much depends on traffic you receive, are these visitors targeted - and most important are you getting relevant keywords. I mostly use the same layout and colors for my sites but CTR depends - some sites receive barely 1% while other more than 4%. One more important fact, sad one - CTR increases if visitors doesn't find what he's looking for. In that case only relevant keywords can help you.
First, what's your CTR? If it's bellow 4% then you can improve it. If you have higher than that I guess you are already fine.
Also, how relevant are the ads that are showing? If they are not relevant, no-one will click on them. Irrelevant ads will show on a site where the advertisers are not biding for the keywords you are using.
LOL. 4% is pretty good... that is why people don't make money. I make over 30% CTR. how? Easy. Make ugly templates, forget about nice templates, with graphics. Also only newbies put their adsense to all their traffic, you need to Learn OpenX if you really want to be able to control who sees your ads. If you keep showing your Adsense to everyone the CTR will always be lower. I preffer to show my ad to 20 people per day that will convert instead of 2000 that will not convert. That's how you really achieve $5 to $15 clicks... But I bet after I post this people will tell me that I have no idea what I'm talking about - that is Digital Point for you.
Do the ads appearing on your pages relate directly to your hobby niche? If not, it might mean that there are too few advertisers for that niche. If that's the case, there's not much you can do. The niche is just not one that will do well with Adsense. If your ads are related, then the problem is something else -- poor ad placement, ads not integrated with content, or your content is too satisfying to your visitors and leaves them with little reason to click ads.
Yea, if you earn only from Adsense. My Adsense earnings are only 20% of what I earn. And usually sites like you described don't have much traffic. More traffic, better sites, more monetization possibilities , more money, long term. I aslo have (had) MFA sites, it brings nice money but it's not the best method definitely