Hi everyone, I just redesigned one of my sites www dot betteratenglish dot com After the redesign, my CTR dropped significantly. The old design is on my testing site: english dot textworkshop dot com As you can see, the ad placement is basically the same, it's just the overall look of the site that is different. I like the new design much better, but am sure missing that CTR! So if anyone has any advice or suggestions for what I can try, I'd really appreciate it!
Much improved design I agree. Since the design is now elastic, as it stretches to the screen size, the ads become a little more isolated. My eyes are drawn to the picture at the right side away from any real advert locations. Perhaps placing a smaller one advert ad near this area, under a new channel, analysing it, will improve things. Also, the link unit at the top is also very isolated. I would replace this with a long horizontal row of text ads.
Thanks for the responses so far. I've taken away the picture to see if that makes a difference. It would be possible to take away the right-hand column and make the site fit 800x600, but I think I'll wait a while and see if performance improves. Who knows, it could be just a slump or that I've triggered a bunch of irrelevant ads. But it's been ages since I had a consistently low ctr for more than one isolated day, so it got me wondering.