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.

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