Hi all...
After running adsense on one of my sites for about 8 months and pulling in a whopping $2-3 on a good day I decided to start playing with layout and color.
Tweaking color and placement, I played with it for about 6 weeks letting each change run for a week or so to get a fairly accurate result. The current layout is identicle in color to the links layout and is the best to date. It's been running this way for about 3 months with strong results.
Original layout was getting 1.8-3.2 CTR with $1.56 average per day earnings About $50 per mo.
New layout grabs 7-12% CTR (last months average was 8.6%) with a daily average of $10.32 Over $300 last 2 mo.
This site gets about 5-7,000 uniques per month with an average of 5 pageviews per unique
Keeping placement to look as non-ad as possible is the key. If you highlight the ads in any way they become poison, why? I don't know but they do. I know it's tough to hide a google ad simply because they have google EVERYWHERE!!!
Ads by Google Advertise on this site
How do you hide that?
Well, if you can get creative with them you can hide it in the open nicely. I choose to use only text ads then follow them with a banner ad (from an advertiser or affiliate) with just a single BREAK, this lands the "Ads by Google" smack on top of the banner making the links look more like a result rather than an ad... ingenious...I know... TY
Color and Placement is the key. Stay away from accenting your site using google ads, it simply doesn't work. Keep the ad backgrounds and text exactly the same colors as the page it is on.
This is just one of the many tricks you can use to increase CTR. If you can get anything over 10% then you are pretty much done optimizing...no more to squeeze...although I did have a 16% day...that was nice.
I hope this gives a few of you a boost in CTR
cheers
Steven
dOh..you can view the site at
www.netshoppers.com - Its a shopping directory with just merchant and business links and if you cruise the main to sub-sub-cats you'll see how adsense placements are done the same throughout to get the highest CTR