So after reading Joel Comm's Ebook, I made sure to make adjustments to my site..... and change the placement of ads, etc. Last week I was making around 1.50 each day. Then no clicks came for two days.... well after changing my ads, it is now even lower! Maybe I am just blind.. and dont see what I am doing wrong? http://www.listentoourband.net
Joel Comm isn't God so don't get too worried. I just watched his 50 minute video on Google Adsense. It was very inspiring Can you please tell me what you changed.
haha. I originally had a skyscraper ad on the left of my page.... and had the same ad embedded into the text. thats pretty much the only thing i changed. any suggestions? i thought the new placement looked good...
I think your placement looks fine, good actually. Note though that all the generic changes you read about, may or may not be helpful to your site. The trick is to test layout changes, font colors, etc until your find what is best for your site. Have you checked your traffic though? Any spikes or changes to your indexed pages recently? Many people are reporting pages dropping out of the index, I read msn just updated their algo. And my traffic is down quite a bit too. I'm showing only your homepage indexed on google, if some of your pages are missing from the index, this might account for drop off. A couple other points I noticed. - The metal link is an empty page, but is displaying google ads. This is breaking the tos, So either ad some content of take the ads out. -consider adding a vertical ad, or link unit under the navigation on the right on all the sub pages. Why is all the content on your site coming from geocities. This real domain you gave us to review is an exact duplicate of www.geocities.com/listentobands/ This might be the reason you have just the home page indexed. I know this is more info than you asked for- But there is a lot of flux recently in indexed pages. As your site looks good to me, there might be more to the drop off in clicks than just the layout changes you made. That dup site could be a problem- if the geocities is yours, I'd take the content down, and just put it all on the real domain name you have.
Thanks! I only have the domain name... and it forwards it to www.geocities.com/listentobands which is my site My traffic actually is quite lower than usual.. so maybe that is why.
The link called metal in the navigation - Add Your Band - Articles - Alternative - Banners - Blues - Christian - Country - Electronic - Emo - Folk - Hip Hop - Indie - Jazz - Links - Metal - Pop - Punk - R&B - Rock
I figured out what you meant. Thanks!! So do you think perhaps I should just wait a week before changing it back to the old layout?
I think maybe it is possible that you had it right before, but trial and error is usually the key, along with accurante record keeping. For example you need to give each layout at least a week to take into account daily fluctuations (Saturdays not being as good as Mondays for example). Despite what all the "advice" tends to say i have always found left hand skyscrapers to be better than the large rectangle or the leader board ESPECIALLY if:- 1. the colours are well blended 2. the ads are VERY highly relevant to your site. If this is the case visitors MAY think the ads are your navi-bar leading to high CTRs. This is especially true if the Ad at the top of the skyscraper is highly relevant to the search term which caused them to land on the site.
It all depends on traffic and the ctr. You need to look at your stats. If your site is getting x visits a day, and is much lower traffic than usual, you may be doing yourself a disservice by changing the layout too early. Say as an example, your traffic was normal and with everything else being the same you started makeing $3.00 a day, you'd know that the change you made were good. (and as far as I can tell, it is good) But if you dropped out of the index, and no one is visiting the site- The issue is not the layout at all. The factors to consider to determine whether you keep the layout (I'm sure you know this, but I thought I should mention it-) Total traffic (any major changes?) Click through rate. (Pageviews/clicks) >>great metric on sucess of layout change Avg Price per click. (If g starts paying 1/2 what they were, rev goes down, even though the performance of your site is exactly the same) It's hard for me to say absolutely what you should do. I'm kind of shooting in the dark with the info you provided, and I can't see how well indexed the site was previously, or what other factors may or may not be involved. But really your stats have the answer. And if you do not have external stats for your traffic, your adsense stats should have the info you need to make your decision. I hope that helps!
I know that the past few days, i had the same impressions (if not more) and there were no clicks at all. Not even one. This leads me to believe that my ad placement was just not working... even though I was bringing in 1.50-2.50 a day before that. Perhaps I should leave this layout for a few days and see....I just dont want to be doing the wrong thing If I could make $5-6 dollars a day id be happy!
You said traffic was down up at the top of the thread. What % is the drop in page impressions from then to now. Or are you saying that in the last few days traffic is back to normal? By all means keep testing though. I would always let a new layout sit for approx 5 days or so just to be sure. There is alot of flux in ctr throughout the week. Also (for me) holidays always cause traffic and ctr to tank.
I meant that the page impressions were normal.. but the clicks were gone.... which was strange because before that i was getting 1.50-2.50 a day. This led me to believe the placement was just not accurate. As for right now, the page impressions are low....but the ctr got higher, and I got at least two clicks for the day. Not good..but at least Im getting clicks right now.