Less Ad Clutter = Higher Earnings?

Discussion in 'Placement / Reviews / Examples' started by jackburton2006, Mar 7, 2006.

  1. #1
    Just an observation for those of you who may or may not have thought about this, as it just occurred to me about a minute ago while checking today (well, yesterday's, actually, now that it's 1:00 in the morning) stats:

    Less ad clutter = higher Adsense earnings!

    Or perhaps I'm grabbing at straws. Some background: on Sunday I made a new site, tossed it onto the net, and have been adding content onto it for the last 2 days. Got about 1K of traffic from Technorati and by leading visitors to it from my other sites. The site only has Adsense on it (as, remember, it's just 2 days old), and today, the site has made nearly HALF of one of my established sites, which gets about 100x more traffic!

    This is truly astounding, and it shocked me when I saw the stats. Is it possible, then, that not having anything on the site but Adsense ads actually made visitors click more? Without all the ads to clutter things up, the Adsense ads stood out, and the visitors didn't automatically go into "ad blind" mode?

    I think this may be the case, and yet one more reason not to go crazy with ads. Of course just because this new site has made half the daily earnings of my more established site (and did it with 100x less traffic to boot!) doesn't mean it's close to making what the other site makes. The established site earns most of its money through CPM networks to begin with, and the new site still has a ton of ways to go to match it.

    So in conclusion, for those of you who haven't tried it, I recommend testing to see if uncluttering your site with ads will increase your earnings. Try it for a week. I'm going to leave the new site uncluttered with CPM ads for a whole month and see what happens.
     
    jackburton2006, Mar 7, 2006 IP
  2. ontheweb

    ontheweb Peon

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    #2
    A significant factor could be that with the new site, there's not much content so users are happier to click away from your site to find what they want.. :)
     
    ontheweb, Mar 7, 2006 IP
  3. jackburton2006

    jackburton2006 Peon

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    #3
    Possible...
     
    jackburton2006, Mar 7, 2006 IP
  4. brecht

    brecht Peon

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    #4
    Since there's no thing as a stupid question.

    how do you get 1k of traffic from technorati?
     
    brecht, Mar 8, 2006 IP
  5. jackburton2006

    jackburton2006 Peon

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    #5
    Technorati is a search site for blogs. If you have a blog, make it ping Technorati everytime you update. Technorati immediately (as in a second later!) scans your new update and tosses it high up in their SERPs so that if someone should be searching for your topic at about the same time, you're instantly on top. Since Technorati is very popular for blog searches, it's easy to get anywhere from 500-1000k uniques if you add enough content per day. Technorati doesn't just go for relevance, but immediacy.
     
    jackburton2006, Mar 8, 2006 IP
  6. sketch

    sketch Well-Known Member

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    #6
    Technorati definitely delivers for me. Not as much as jack here, but it's definitely my best or second best referrer.

    I think less ad = higher earnings may be true as well. I was in a similar situation where I had one site that got a steady stream of uniques every day, but I only got 2-3 clicks per day, and this was after 4-5 months of almost daily updates.

    With a new site I started just a month ago, I'm now averaging 15-20 clicks per day, the ads are tighter and I use Google's collapsible code, so if there's no ad to show it collapses the ad.

    The ads are also more spread apart (on my last site they were all bunched on one side), so if less ads doesn't work, perhaps try more even distribution within the page.
     
    sketch, Mar 8, 2006 IP
  7. GerryBot

    GerryBot Peon

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    #7
    I recently redesigned my Unreality TV website and made a point of tidying up the Adsense layout. This included blending in the ads better and placing them according to best practice on Google's heatmap. There's been a definite improvement in the CTR since.

    Implementing channels is a great way of working out which placements are the best performers. I've found link units underneath the header to be very effective.
     
    GerryBot, Mar 9, 2006 IP
  8. brecht

    brecht Peon

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    #8
    thx for the info! i added my blog and saw result. or there any other search sites for blogs or other forms of referers to get extra traffic appart from traffic from google or msn or yahoo?
     
    brecht, Mar 9, 2006 IP