Earn more with Adsense - Boosting Click Through Rate (CTR)

I will say nothing you didn’t hear yet. The only difference I think that this time you will hear my own experience, not the niche you can find everywhere.

First of all, you have to have traffic. If you don’t have traffic, you have no revenue… In adsense terms, there are no impressions. My experience is that you have to have at least 100 visitors on daily basis, to notice that you actually have some revenue. With 100 visitors your earning will be low, but there will be revenue and the feeling is very cool.
By the way, did I mention you have to have a website or blog.

Placing the ads AKA ad placement

This can be a massive factor and there are two possibilities: you place the ads in wrong places where you have low Click-through-Rate (CTR), or you place in the wrong place and you have low CTR. Simple as 123.
So what do I think about ad placements? I give examples, that’s the easiest way to explain. Each link opens in new window or tab so you are not distracted from this page.
First, I assume you have a menu on your website. Either a horizontal menu bar or links on a sidebar, where the navigation menu is placed vertically.
If you have a horizontal menu, you can create a horizontal link unit which you place below or above the menu. An example: http://hotnews-4u.com/. As You see, in the upper side of the page there’s a link unit, which performs very well, having a CTR always above 2%. Which is extremely good CTR.
For vertical example: this site. Look on the right side of the page, below the search box. A small ad unit, but with fair CTR. It’s always around 1%, sometimes a bit below, sometimes a bit above. I consider this CTR good because there are ads which are around 0% somewhere, so 1% is fair.
Another thing you can try is to place ads into the post. Like here: Emachines e510 Notebook Review. As you see, at the very beginning of the post there is an ad unit on the upper right corner. From this website, that’s the best performing the best, having a CTR of around 3%. Which is more than good.
If you scroll a bit down, you will see some ad units. That ad is also performing better than I expected, having a CTR of around 2.5%.
So, conclusion: To have a great CTR, the best positions are around the navigation menus and inside the content. That’s not a news, that’s what the Adsense optimization tips says, too.
But what it doesn’t say, that it does matter on which side you put an ad unit in your content! I’m not a ad marketing genius, so I tested something which shocked me. Here: Emachines e510 Notebook Review, the ad unit was on the left side of the post. As soon as I changed its location and pushed it to the right, it’s CTR has been boosted from ~1.5% to 3%! Why, I have no idea, but it has been doubled just because I changed the float value from left to right. Does this method always double your CTR? I have no idea. Test it and you will know. If possible report back, cos I’d be interested, too.

Having the right color AKA ad blending

Now this is weird. Or not. The optimization tips of AdSense says that webmasters should set the colors of the ads in a way to have the ads seamlessly integrated in the website’s color palette. That’s logical for me, but the some things were not. I elaborate, don’t worry.
An ad unit has three visible text portions. These are the title, the text and the URL. First I had the title color and the URL color similar to the colors used on Devoracles for the anchors. Both were some sort of orange, but they were not identical. The CTR was lower though. On a rainy day I decided to adjust these colors to be identical, now both the URLs on Devoracles and the titles of the ads are the same color. The CTR has been boosted a bit, not much though.
Look to the ads in Emachines e510 Notebook Review. I decided to set the URL to a color which is completely indifferent. In my case something which is almost the background color, cos the AdSense engine doesn’t let you to set it exactly to the background color. As soon as the color has been changed, the CTR arrived to its current state, around 3%.
So, conclusion: The color of the title and the text should be exactly the same as the color of the URLs and text on your website, the URL on the other hand something which is almost invisible.

An interesting thing

The other day I found a blog-post at Scratch99. Stephen, the author talks about the AdSense Smart Pricing, which basically (and in short) means that we, publishers don’t get the maximum possible PPC rate. So while the AdWords advertiser pays a lot for a given keyword, let’s say $50 (yeah, 50 US dollars per click), we, publishers receive only its tiny bit, usually 1 dam cent.
This is reflected on one of my post where I talk about a PC case which has been fireproofed using asbestos. Asbestos and the related keywords are extremely expensive, I think the US lawyers pushed the price in the skies, but that’s not relevant now. So, I received some clicks on the above mentioned post and what I earned? 1 cent per click, which is surrealistic, unfair and disappointing.
To learn what is and how you can avoid the Smart Pricing, read Stephen’s post on his blog.

XHTML Strict incompatible with target attribute: FALSE

Clients… I had to create a website… XHTML Strict… AND opening all links in a new tab/window.
No probs, there’s the target attribute of the anchor elements! But not in XHTML Strict!
W3 states clearly that target attributes should be forgotten and avoided. Why, I have no idea, but if you want to create XHTML Strict pages, you can forget about the target attribute.

So let’s hack with Javascript this rule! Rules are set to have something to brake, that’s what we’ll do now. This is very simple code, basically a single function which loops through the document and adds to all the anchor elements the “target=’_blank’” attribute. As it’s created with Javascript, the XHTML validators should not observe. I think they won’t observe, so first check it out somewhere.

So, the Javascript code to open links in new window/tab while maintaining the XHTML Strict compliance is:

function open_in_new_tab() {
if (!document.getElementsByTagName){
return;
/*If the browser doesn't support DOM, do nothing*/
}
var anchors = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
/*Select all the 'a' tags, anchors*/
for (var i=0; i<anchors.length; i++) {
var links = anchors[i];
if (links.getAttribute("href")){
/*every anchor with 'href' attribute will get a new attribute,
only those with 'href' attribute set because we don't want
to mess with the section anchors, for example*/
links.target = "_blank";
}
}
}
window.onload = open_in_new_tab;
/*finally load the function on page load*/

And the word is saved again.

Earning more with AdSense tip: Grab the hot trends

Now this is weird. I’ve read somewhere, don’t ask me where though, that if you have a page displaying the Google HotTrends and placing near them AdSense ad blocks will give some extremely good results.

As an AdWords user, I say this is not true as it’s not a rule that the keywords from the HotTrends have higher cost per click.

Anyway, I made a little experiment. I grabbed the HotTrends Atom feed with Magpie RSS parser then placed near them two Adsense adverts: a Skyscraper and a Link unit. On this page that content is brought with an IFrame, because I don’t want the AdSense BOT to crawl for keywords other than the HotTrends’. As AdSense Mediabot can’t brake out of an IFrame, it’s perfect for this situation.
I have a small concern about the experiment violating some AdSense policy, specifically the “content-less page” part. Whatever, I hope it doesn’t. I would write them an e-mail asking for permission but I usually don’t get answer, so I just don’t write. Whatever.

Let’s see the IFramed Trends:

The trends you see, that’s sure. If on the right side of the trends you see some big red blocks, it means there was no content the AdSense BOT can crawl, thus will display alternate color.

If there are ads, all’s good. Will report how they performed if there will be earning resulting from the trends’ ads. Or that’s another policy issue?

How much page views and hits do you get?

I was wondering about this for long and what I see is only the servers’ hits I manage.

What about you? Do you know a rough number, or if you don’t want to tell this precious info, when was the most hits you got and what caused the high number of visits?

If a conversation starts I will add devoracles’s details too

Javascript pop-up windows and parent page refreshing

This subject is quite interesting and i was searching for examples for long. Then I managed to do something, true that only by combining many examples i’ve found.

Let’s see the code then I’ll try to explain everything.

function popUp(URL) {
window.open(URL, 'WindowName', 'toolbar=0,scrollbars=1,location=0,statusbar=0,menubar=0,resizable=0,width=300,height=400');
}
window.onload = popUp("http://example.com");

The above function will pop-up window which will contain the page you put as value in the popUp function. I’ve put http://example.com, you put whatever you like, but preferably from your own domain if you want to have access to the pop-up’s DOM. You can play with the toolbar,scrollbars,location variables till hurts, basically they define how the popped up window will look and act. I wrote the above script so to pop the window up when the page loads (window.onload) , if you don’t like that and the fact that this even is blocked by most pop-up blockers, you can put a HTML button or link somewhere in the page, like this:

Pop Up the window

As I said before, there’s a slight issue with the stuff if you use the window.onload, specifically that your pop-up much likely will be blocked by pop-up blockers. You don’t want that, and even if it succeeds to pop-up, it’s annoying for the visitor, so just don’t do it, please.

OK, now let’s see the the parent window refreshing. Prent window is the page which pop-up up the small window. The pop-up window is the child. Usually, we use the parent refresh if we want to transfer a variable from the pop-up to the parent. The script which has to be placed in the child, popped up window is the following script:

function Parent() {
  window.opener.location.href = window.opener.location.href;
  if (window.opener.progressWindow){
    window.opener.progressWindow.close()
  }
  window.close();
}

and the button or link which closes and refreshes the parent window is

Click here to close this window and refresh the parent

A working example is situated here. It’s a loop so if your pop-up blocker doesn’t block the first pop-up, most likely you’ll get annoyed in no time.

And I think that was all. You can also transfer variables from one window to other, but that’s for another day… so, the show is over… there’s nothing to see here, pass over please.

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