Hey guys, I just had a huge change with my site and am taking a big hit financially with my ad design/placement not working out in my favor. I moved from WordPress to Squarespace and have a new domain name in www.gigamarks.com (previously was fivefreeapps.com). I found decent success in the past with the 336x280 blended top left corner of the site, but no longer am. So, I started testing various placements and ad sizes, but still coming up way short. With the new home/domain, I'm getting around 2k page views & 1200 or so uniques a day. Any help or suggestions to improve the placement/size/design of the ads or recommendations for the site are most welcome. Thanks in advance, Brian
One thing that you don't want to do with Adsense after these second rounds of Panda updates is to spam it all over your site like crazy. Don't have too many ad blocks within the actual content, or placed in a way that confuses the user. I used to put a horizontal link unit at the top, with a skyscraper on my left sidebar, and a giant square block in the top right of my content. The CTR was outrageous - like 10-15%. But Google slapped me hard. Now you'll want to back off on the ads and make sure your website is visually pleasing to the user, as well as informative. Don't overdo it on the placements.
Thanks for the input. After having the terrible success lately, I'm trying out Adbrite. Currently, I have a 300x250 block in the top left hand corner of each post, rather than the top 728 banner ad. If this don't work, I'll try it lower. As far as number of ads, I'm only using one in each post, so think I'm ok in qty. Just need to work on placement and continue to test each I guess.
yeah, split testing is really the key to increasing CTR. I wouldn't hold your breath on the adbrite though. They typically pay pennies compared to Adsense. Adsense has the largest and most expensive advertising network on the planet for CPC.