Just a tip that some of you may want to try. As usual, what works for adsense, or any monetization scheme, on one site doesn't necessarily work on another. In my honest opinion though, this tip is almost universal. We all love images, right? Of course. A lot of times I will visit a page and skip all of the text just to look at the images. I like photos becaue they are often funny, they help me understand what the page is usually about, and you can easily tell an entire story just from one pic. Guess what. Your visitors are just the same. When you have a page full of cool pics, they skip past everything (including the ADS!) to look at the photos. Get it? When you have photos on a page, they won't even see your ads! Here is a great way to test this: Take one page that you currently have a good bit of traffic coming to. Create a new adsense ad with its new channel. Let's call it the "imagefreetest". Now strip all of the images from that page of yours and place your test adsense ad into it. Watch what will happen. I will bet you that your ctr will double for that page. You could also take an entire site (one that isn't too big) and try the same thing. if you have steady traffic to this site, you will likely see a large jump in the ctr after removing all of the images from it. Another spin on this is just to lower the number of pics on a page and shift them to other areas. For instance, place a single image near an ad unit to draw the visitor's attention to the ads (this is ok as long as you don't mislead by making it look like an image lines up with each ad). You could also relocate a single image to the bottom of your page. You could even just reduce the size of the image so that it doesn't draw all of the attention on the page. I know this sucks. I love pics, and pics can make a site look so nice. You also get a bunch of image serp traffic from photos (the WORST source of traffic btw), and that can suck to have your awstat number go down. But it works. Give it a try and tell me what happens, if you feel like it. Good luck everyone! Here's to no more images!! lol
interesting experiment on usability and clickability. kinda new here, but i have noticed lots of sites here aren't big on graphic design. this probably explains it.
The less graphically oriented a site is, the higher the ctr will be. It's almost always true. When there are so many shiny and pretty things to look at on a page, nobody pays attention to the content you want them to notice- the ads.
Good advice, but most of my traffic right now comes from images.google.com The only reason people come to my site is to view images. I'll keep this in mind though for future pages. Thanks for the advice.
Man, I just can't tell you how bad image serp traffic sucks. It's worse than Stumble traffoc even. 99% of them never even go to your page. Cool. Let me know how it goes, if you don't mind. It's a fun thing to try. The results can be amazing. GWO? Nah, never tried it.