No, I didn't increase the revenue by 300% and I am certainly not making 1000$/month, nonetheless, I did experience a nice growth from some simple layout change I expected and indeed found to help. I thought I would share with you the results of this little experiment, and give a little back to this useful forum. A little background. Since I don't want to cram my site with ads, there are only two types of ad units in it. One is in the navigation blocks on the left, and a second unit at the bottom of the pages. The idea is that either people are not interested in the content, in which case they look for the navigation options and may stumble on ads, or, if they read a whole article/blog entry/whatever, they reach its end and 'forced' to read the ads at the end of the page. I didn't want to place a banner or top page type of ad unit because I would lose people who would otherwise might have read the article (which is the main point of my site... not the revenue!). Anyway, the simply layout modification was to add a block on the left showing random content related images with links to other articles in the site, this was placed below the adsense ads. The idea was that people looking at the navigation options would either want to stay in the site (because the picture caught the eye) or if they don't follow the picture/link their eye would wonder to the ads next to the picture. This would imply two things, that I would expect to keep them longer in my site and that they would tend to click the ads next to the images more often, and indeed these two effects appear to take place. First, the CTR increased by a factor of almost 1.6! The number of pages per visitor increased as well, but here the statistics are harder to measure because of the large variations (different types of visitors tend to read a different number of pages in the site, and the visitor types varies quite considerably from day to day). Anyway, as far as I could estimate it (i.e., by looking at particular pages), it was about a 10% increase in the number of pages viewed per visit. Obviously, a picture on an otherwise homogeneous page "pulls" the eyes towards it and to anything next to it... including ads. Anyway, that's that, I hope it is useful info, at least for some. Now if I could only drive more traffic to the site....
Excellent work and congratulations! Who knows, maybe $1000/month isn't as hard as you think. Good luck!
Well, either way, I found your site very interesting and it's good to see people blogging about what they like and not what they think is the highest paying keyword. More power to you.
Excellent implementation. The image is within the program policies, since there is a clear separation from the ads, with a border created by a different background color, etc. (On another thread, I've made a summary of the image requirements, as explained by AdSense Support to a large number of publishers, including of course to me in several emails). The only potential problem I see on your site is the label "Sponsor Bits". I would change it asap:
Thanks for the tip. Changed to Additional Bits. (A little play of words... but I would imagine within guidelines?)
Publishers may not label the ads with text other than "sponsored links" or "advertisements". I think you've read it wrong. It should only read sponsored links OR advertisements. Additional Bits is way off. I'd say shoot Google an email about Sponsor bits. You'll probably get an ambiguous answer, but it'll be worth it.
They usually just refer to the program policies. For any special interpretation of the rules, we need a review and a written OK from Support. Perhaps they might make an exception with a middle point in line with other labels on your site, such as "Sponsored Bits" (rather than "Sponsor Bits" or "Additional Bits", clearly not correct). But they can also say no. However, the possible labels indicated in the guidelines are: - "Sponsored links" - "Advertisements" - Or no label.
I guess I'll change it to Sponsored Links and e-mail them if it is o.k. to change to Sponsored Bits. Thanks for the info.
Ah, you found the tool... I did some research on that one. I think I know how to improve it even more, but it would require some nongligible work and time [which I don't have]. For now, it is typically correct to within +/- 1 PR point.
Re: Just been playing with this tool, it's really good! ...I think it may be a little optimistic though. I've noticed that the site that I'm really working on doesn't have as good a PR as one that I do nothing with, typical. I'd be very interested to try it out when you've made your amendments. Thanks.
Thanks for sharing your experience. Its small improvements like this that make a huge difference to earnings in the long run. From my own experience I have notice that the quality of the image used can have a huge impact on CTR. A clearer and more vivid image works best. Thanks again.
Put an ad above the fold for people who don't read the whole article (most of them). 300x250 might work nice.
I would imagine it would certainly increase the CTR, but I am not willing to make the site look like a for-profit site...
a. Yes... in this case a 60% increase. That's definitely not negligible! The problem is that the CPC seemed to go down with it... b. Thanks for the tip.
Probably you mean 60% CTR increase (factor 1.6), and maybe a little bit less CPC? What about eCPM? Up or down?