Need Adsense Guru- CTR has dropped a few % points over time, 75,000 page views/mo

[verbs]

So here's the skinny. I have a messageboard with a homepage separate from the messageboard.

My website overall has been running adsense in late 2007. When I first put adsense on my site I was getting a decent CTR per month.

I haven't changed the ads at all but slowly overtime my CTR has gone down a few percentage points over the last 3 years. This equates to roughly a 75% drop in CTR. It started going downhill late 2008.

Over 90% of my traffic every day is new traffic.

I've already had a redesign done for my new site and want to make sure my ad placement is optimal.

Here's my current site:

www.obesitydiscussion.com

New site design going live in a few weeks

Obesity Discussion - Rediscover What's Inside


Any idea on why my adsense would have tanked with no other changes?

Any suggestions on adsense placement/type/color/size for the new version site? The adsense ads you see on the new version of the site are just temporary until I figure out where the place the ads.

I'm even debating on hiring someone to help me out with this, the fact that I'm only making a few hundred $$$ on this site is stupid.

[nc31]

Your color ads look like not similiar with Page color..

[MatthewGreen]

Looks like you are heavily advertising on this site. Forget adsense and go over to clickbank and put some weight loss banners up. Some of those offers are $30 a sale. After the stock banners stop getting sales buy some new custom banners. Or you could put a new offer up. You could also sell advertising space. Much more money in that than adsense.

[verbs]

Originally Posted by MatthewGreen

Looks like you are heavily advertising on this site. Forget adsense and go over to clickbank and put some weight loss banners up. Some of those offers are $30 a sale. After the stock banners stop getting sales buy some new custom banners. Or you could put a new offer up. You could also sell advertising space. Much more money in that than adsense.

You think I can make more money on these than from Adsense? If so it's worth a try. My top right 468x60 banner will make me a whopping $35 this month on 57,000 page views and about 60 clicks.

[verbs]

Originally Posted by MatthewGreen

Looks like you are heavily advertising on this site. Forget adsense and go over to clickbank and put some weight loss banners up. Some of those offers are $30 a sale. After the stock banners stop getting sales buy some new custom banners. Or you could put a new offer up. You could also sell advertising space. Much more money in that than adsense.

What I currently have is 3 adsense ads towards the top, a worthless amazon ad on the bottom that brings me zero revenue, and on on the right side you can see I have some sponsors' links and banners. I used to make about $300/month on sponsor ads and links when I was actively selling those, but because I was under the impression that google frowns upon those so I stopped selling those a long time ago.

[PooFinger]

From a very quick look the obvious thing to me that stands out is your ad placement. I use a laptop with a 15" screen so this maybe different if I had a 23" screen, but if I'm viewing the forums I scroll straight down to where I can see the forum. This means that I spend less than a second at the top of the page where I can see the ads.

When viewing a forum, the ads are placed next to a video, my eyes automatically go to the video and skip the ads. As someone else has said, there is a lot going on on each page. Try using a adsense ad as wide as the forum post and not to high between posts to see if this helps, don't have heaps of adsense per page though as users get ad blindness.

Also try other forms of monetizing. Look at clickbank, be very selective though as you have a great site and don't want to put crappy products up. Also checkout other places such as cj.com

[PooFinger]

And one other thing comes to mind, if a majority of your traffic is from returning visitors, these visitors are probably less likely to click a adsense ad as they are there for the forum, not searching for information or exits.

[verbs]

Originally Posted by PooFinger

And one other thing comes to mind, if a majority of your traffic is from returning visitors, these visitors are probably less likely to click a adsense ad as they are there for the forum, not searching for information or exits.

More than 90% of my traffic is always new visitors.

[PooFinger]

Another consideration is that maybe some of the higher PPC companies have added your site to their list of urls that ads wont display.

But try cleaning up the page some, so the areas around the ads aren't so cluttered, and that there aren't so many adsense ads. And then placement of ads.

[verbs]

Originally Posted by yukon

Sounds like Ad blindness.

Maybe rotate Ads on page refresh sort of like the Adsense CTR-Theme does.

Not a bad idea.

Originally Posted by PooFinger

Another consideration is that maybe some of the higher PPC companies have added your site to their list of urls that ads wont display.

But try cleaning up the page some, so the areas around the ads aren't so cluttered, and that there aren't so many adsense ads. And then placement of ads.

That's a good point; a while back before I blocked China and India from my website, a larger percentage (not huge) of my traffic was spammers. That may have had a negative impact on clicks. Is there a way to find out if you've been blocked from these higher PPC companies?

Like I said, I'm migrating to the new version of my site in a week or two, so it's probably not worth the effort to make changes to my current site.




Does anyone have any feedback on best ad placement and type for the new design of my website that hasn't gone live yet?

Obesity Discussion - Rediscover What's Inside

[verbs]

Originally Posted by PooFinger

From a very quick look the obvious thing to me that stands out is your ad placement. I use a laptop with a 15" screen so this maybe different if I had a 23" screen, but if I'm viewing the forums I scroll straight down to where I can see the forum. This means that I spend less than a second at the top of the page where I can see the ads.

When viewing a forum, the ads are placed next to a video, my eyes automatically go to the video and skip the ads. As someone else has said, there is a lot going on on each page. Try using a adsense ad as wide as the forum post and not to high between posts to see if this helps, don't have heaps of adsense per page though as users get ad blindness.

Currently I have a video that appears between the first and second post that pays me when people view it, but the videos aren't converting for crap so I was going to swap it out for an adsense ad. I'm not aware of any adsense ads that would be as wide as the forum posts, they're huge! I thought the widest you could get is 728? My forum would be a lot wider than that I believe.

Originally Posted by PooFinger

Also try other forms of monetizing. Look at clickbank, be very selective though as you have a great site and don't want to put crappy products up. Also checkout other places such as cj.com

I'll take a look at those as well, thanks! Couldn't hurt to try some other options.

[JamesGw]

Switch up your ads a bit. Message boards are great for building a customer base, but they have the weakness of having a lot of repeat traffic. This can, as Yukon pointed out, result in ad blindness. You can experiment with different ways to generate revenue. A market system might be kinda cool, where people pay for points in order to be able to do silly things like change their name color and whatnot. Mostly, though, just rotate your ad provider or position every 2-3 months IMO.

[verbs]

Originally Posted by JamesGw

Switch up your ads a bit. Message boards are great for building a customer base, but they have the weakness of having a lot of repeat traffic. This can, as Yukon pointed out, result in ad blindness. You can experiment with different ways to generate revenue. A market system might be kinda cool, where people pay for points in order to be able to do silly things like change their name color and whatnot. Mostly, though, just rotate your ad provider or position every 2-3 months IMO.

My assumption was that since all I had was adsense, my ads were constantly changing anyway, so I didn't see the need to make any other changes to prevent blindness. Or are you talking more about changing away from adsense type ads for a change of pace or even changing ad placement?

The market system is a great idea, something I was tinkering with employing down the road.

[xylement]

Sounds like you have to move around your ads, or change size or change color of your ads. Banner Blindness =D

[verbs]

Originally Posted by xylement

Sounds like you have to move around your ads, or change size or change color of your ads. Banner Blindness =D

I understand banner blindness keeps being mentioned, and that could be a problem, but that alone wouldn't cause my CTR to drop by a few percentage points.

[yukon]

Originally Posted by verbs

I understand banner blindness keeps being mentioned, and that could be a problem, but that alone wouldn't cause my CTR to drop by a few percentage points.

As an example, I can't remember a single time I've every clicked any banner Ads on this forum.

The reason is, I'm on this forum a lot, & I know what are Ads & what is content, I don't even really notice that the Ads are there, I just skip over them without thinking about it.

New traffic will tend to click Ads before old traffic will click them.

Mix it up, with paid banner space. Get some php code to rotate Ads every day or two.

[verbs]

Originally Posted by yukon

As an example, I can't remember a single time I've every clicked any banner Ads on this forum.

The reason is, I'm on this forum a lot, & I know what are Ads & what is content, I don't even really notice that the Ads are there, I just skip over them without thinking about it.

New traffic will tend to click Ads before old traffic will click them.

Mix it up, with paid banner space. Get some php code to rotate Ads every day or two.

I'm going to install Adpeeps for the purpose of having some banner rotation for sponsors, but having google adsense is like having banner rotation and those are the banners I'm wondering about....

You are right, the returning users are the ones who bypass ads most....but since I'm still getting the same amount of new traffic both in numbers and percentage compared to 3 years ago, there has to be another explanation.

I just can't figure out why if nothing has changed as far as the percentage of new users I get, the placement of the ads, etc. in the last 3 years, why would CTR plunge?

[troybh]

Its badly laid out. The 460x 60 top looks sloppy and should be a larger horizontal. Also you should have a horizontal banner below and above your navigation. The amazon looks stupid and probably should just be eliminated. Try yieldbuild and they will rotate the add colors etc to get you the highest conversion rates.

[yukon]

You do have an advantage over most sites by having a forum (it is a forum right?).

If it's a forum, have all your moderators do a screenshot of the page in question, & compare all the screenshots to what your seeing on your own monitor.

What kind of Adsense Ads are showing up on all the screenshots?

That's the way I would do it. I wouldn't tell the Mods. why I needed the screenshots, that's not any of their business IMO. Do it all by email, nothing public.

[edit]

Never mind, I see the forum only has 6 post total.

[verbs]

Originally Posted by yukon

You do have an advantage over most sites by having a forum (it is a forum right?).

If it's a forum, have all your moderators do a screenshot of the page in question, & compare all the screenshots to what your seeing on your own monitor.

What kind of Adsense Ads are showing up on all the screenshots?

That's the way I would do it. I wouldn't tell the Mods. why I needed the screenshots, that's not any of their business IMO. Do it all by email, nothing public.

[edit]

Never mind, I see the forum only has 6 post total.

yes I do have a forum. The one you are looking at is my brand new design that I want feedback on before it goes live. Those 6 posts are just test posts.

If you go to my forum here: Obesity Forum, Weight Loss Forum, Diet Forum - Blogs & Support Groups you'll see I have about 78,000 posts.

I was hoping for some feedback on problems with the old design that is currently live (maybe why CTR dropped over the last 3 years, or ways to improve my adsense setup), so I don't make a mistake with the new design (the one you just looked at).

The google adsense ads that tend to pop up are either weight loss related products or they are related to recently browsed webpages from what I can tell.

[Cool Hand Luke]

Originally Posted by PooFinger

Another consideration is that maybe some of the higher PPC companies have added your site to their list of urls that ads wont display.

But try cleaning up the page some, so the areas around the ads aren't so cluttered, and that there aren't so many adsense ads. And then placement of ads.

Wait....Your name is "PooFinger"? You chose that name to sign up to a forum? Really?

[Josh MacDonald]

I have 9% CTR, maybe I can help. PM me.

[verbs]

Originally Posted by Josh MacDonald

I have 9% CTR, maybe I can help. PM me.

Josh, I don't have enough posts to send a PM, could you email me? info@obesitydiscussion.com

Thanks!

[verbs]

Originally Posted by Cool Hand Luke

Wait....Your name is "PooFinger"? You chose that name to sign up to a forum? Really?

I think I've seen his username on other boards too. lol