Hello, I'm pretty much new to hosting advertising on a site as a provider. I've started a free games site and I have a couple of different layouts so far, I'm not sure which one is best, I'd like to get some feedback from the experts here. I don't have enough traffic to gauge whether or not my ad placement will yield solid clickthrough numbers. At this point I'm mostly looking to optimize the site before really pushing the marketing. The first example can be found at http://www.gamebooty.com/ . Sorry I don't have linking privileges at these forums yet. I've got just a text banner in the middle of the content on this section, pretty nondescript. Previously the adsense div where that banner is had 3 250x250 ads in it, with a text ad in the middle and 2 image ads at each side. This yielded pretty good clickthrough though my traffic was so low that I couldn't accurately gauge just how good the layout was. I had anywhere from 3%-5% clickthrough for what I got which I felt is at least a good start. Right now I'm getting only like 15 views a day and no clicks for today, so who knows where it's at right now. The other example, which I just finished, can be found at http://www.gamebooty.com/freeiphonegames.html . This layout is probably a bit wide even for 1024x768, but I'll soon make the blue main content area about 50 pixels narrower to remedy this. I'm seriously considering designing the site for 1024x768 and higher resolution, gamers on the whole have pretty good hardware. Does anyone have any impressions of how I could improve things or adjust things? I have a very elementary understanding of the dynamics involved in designing a really good adsense layout, so I could definitely use some help. Thanks, peace.
I've updated every page to that layout, with the colors for the side text links faded so that they're unobtrusive. Thanks for the assessment indy, it'll be cool seeing what the clickthrough's like. I'll probably ultimately have links to indie games festivals and stuff as ads, but adsense is good for starters. Thanks again.
Hey there, I just checked out the site. Site looks good but personally I dont find the placement very worthwhile. The reason I say this is that there is no reason to even look at them, they do not follow the rest of the page and are located on the outside of my vision when reading the site. If possible you really want to try some, either at the top/bottom or actually integrated somehow rather than on the outskirts. Its kinda like a reatil shopping mall, would you locate it away from town on the outskirts where there is no traffic? Probably not, you would want it on a well travelled existing road. Hope that helps. Check out my site for more ideas at adsenseoverdrive.
Actually, it's very hard to gauge the effectiveness of each different layout if you have low traffic. Once you have attain that, then only you can experiment around to see which is best.
the leaderboard add in the middle looks good. my suggestion would to definitely get rid of the frame with the content in it and just add the content to the page so a visitor can just surf the entire page. Next, clean up the content and make it more visually appealing maybe adding some pictures, ect and make the listings look like adsense as much as possible. Then add some adsense blocks within the content. Then get some traffic and test and tweek it.