Tips that helped me increase my Google AdSense CTR

These days even though my traffic has increased my AdSense Click Through Rate (CTR) remains low. I tried many things to increase my CTR like putting images next to my Ads, implementing , blended Ads, placing Ads near content, choosing best Ad format, etc but I did not succeed in increasing my CTR much.

A few days back, while chatting with LiewCF, I asked him for some suggestions to increase my CTR. He quickly gave me some tips which I had not thought of before. I tried some of them and I already noticed my CTR improve. What were those tips?

Below I have listed the tips that Liew suggested to me along with my comments. But please do note that these tips are meant for my site. They may or may not work for you.

remove the date icon, it steals the visitor’s attention from the Ads
Here Liew talks about the Date Stamp next to my title. According to him, the Date stamp distracts my visitors from the AdSense Ads.I will be removing them in my next theme redesign.
remove ‘categories’ and ‘tags’ after post title
According to Liew, the “categories” and “tags” near my title are some of the other things that distract my visitors from the Adsense Ads. I took a look at how “categories” were shown on Liew’s blog and found that the main difference was that his ‘Categories’ had no images next to them like mine.So I just removed it’s images instead of removing or placing them at the end of the post.
use line instead of shadow for the image next to Ad or flip the shadow to other side
I just used Adsense Beautifier which uses a vertical line to separate the images from the Ad.
move out the blogging, tweaks, etc on top: I am not sure I want to do this.
swap the left and right sidebar: I will be doing this on my next theme redesign
use smaller icon image
Liew says that the big images of floppies and DVDs next to my AdSense Ads tempted him to click the images instead of the Ads. I felt he was right, so I enabled AdSense Beautifier which shows smaller images by default.
use same color for the adsense text and url
I had earlier experimented with same color for the link and url, but not for text and url. Anyways I tried this too.
don’t put the image at top and bottom, try somewhere in the middle
I enabled Adsense Beautifer, which uses 4 images for the large rectangle format.
try darker link color, it will make your Ads stand out from the blue links
This is a good tip that all of us should try out.

So how much did my CTR increase? The answer is…’not much’, but it did improve and I would like to thank Liew for that.

I hope atleast some of these tips were useful to you. What other tips would you add?

Posted on October 20th, 2006 | Category: Make Money Online |

17 Responses so far

CypherHackz

October 21, 2006 at 12:08 am

just to add up one more tip. put ads above comment form is also a good way to improve ctr.

JohnTP

October 21, 2006 at 12:14 am

Yes, that is one of the useful tips given by ‘Inside Adsense’ on this post.

If there’s a comment section after the post, place a banner or a horizontal link unit just above the comment box.

Kevin

October 21, 2006 at 7:47 am

Good post. I am struggling with the same issue. I think one of the main issues is that the type of users that are attracted to you site (and mine) are the type that ignores ads.

Christer Edwards

October 21, 2006 at 12:33 pm

I have tried a number of things to raise my CTR and nothing seems too noticeable. Right now I’m using the “Adsense Injector” which randomizing the location of the ad within the post. I really like how it works and, I think, helps to avoid ad blindness.

I’ll see if I can take advantage of some of your tips as well. Thanks.

Rub3X

October 21, 2006 at 4:24 pm

Cool tips, but they’re pretty specific to your website. I’ll have to try some of them on the new version of my site.

Andrew Grant

October 22, 2006 at 11:33 am

I’m not sure what you mean about swapping the left & right sidebars.
I think your sidebar layout is perfect as it is. Currently the flow from left to right is article->recent-articles->categories, which fits with how people tend to digest content that interests them,

I do think the position of your main ads are a problem though. I’ve only seen a few sites that position them above the content and I’ve become trained to skip over them to the article content.

When someone clicks on a link to an article it’s because they have a high level of interest in reading that article and they’re unlikely to be sidetracked by adverts - remember most people instinctively feel clicking a link will take them away from the current page.

The ideal time for a visitors eyes to fall onto adverts is *after* they’ve read the content they came for and their next step is undetermined.

$0.02

Andrew Grant

October 22, 2006 at 11:40 am

Btw; I disagree about removing the date. I really like your date icon and I feel it does a good job of drawing the readers eye to the current article - which is directly above the adverts.

Innovation Zen

October 22, 2006 at 2:33 pm

John, have you tried link adsense units? like the ones you place on the sidebar. People tend to say that they perform best, or almost equal the squares, what is your take on them?

esofthub

October 22, 2006 at 5:24 pm

John, I’m going to try a couple of your suggestions.

But I think a lot of my problems deals with legacy Blogger. Their servers are hit really hard in the morning hours. I’m thinking about moving to Wordpress. A friend of mind has and he noted increased performance.

I’m just learning how to tread in this blogging space (1.5 months) — but that’s another problem.

Malcolm

October 22, 2006 at 9:12 pm

yeh i struggled with this getting only about 0.25% ctr for ages which was so gutting so i searched around and found some very good tips. I tried putting the images next to the adsense box which worked well. Also messing around with colours worked well one colour almost doubled the ctr compared to every other colour. So i would recommend playing around with that trying a different colour everyday and seeing which one works best. I would also give this Increase adsense revenue guide a read as overall i felt it was very effective and had some other good tips. Cheers for the great post.

Amey jahagirdar

October 29, 2006 at 10:54 am

hey i have followed ur post and it seems interesting to me.
afterall we run blosite to earn some money.

besides do u follow any extraa services besides adsense to earn money

listikal

October 30, 2006 at 5:33 am

Thanks for the tips. I avoid putting ads on my homepage and I took the advice of the first comment and put ad links and a small banner just above my comments section.

JohnTP

October 31, 2006 at 8:36 pm

Kevin - Regular readers mostly skip Ads (Ad Blindness). So you should try to rotate colors. You may also give ‘Adsense Injector’ a try.

Andrew Grant - Maybe I should try to blend the Ads into the content instead of putting it at the top.

Innovation Zen- For me the Ads on top of the content on every single post page performs the best. Link Units performs well too.

Amey jahagirdar- Besides Adsense, I use Text Link Ads

Andrew Grant

October 31, 2006 at 10:46 pm

“Maybe I should try to blend the Ads into the content instead of putting it at the top.”

I think that would be a good idea. If you use Wordpress’s ‘more’ tag then on the article page you could use that to split the post into two with the ads between them.

You could also look at placing the adverts somewhere in the sidebar, so they run alongside the text of the post.

Mike

November 5, 2006 at 3:48 pm

Yes, blending is a very good idea. That’s exactly what I’ve done a little while ago and the CRT has increased significantly.

When blending I use the text-only ads with colour scheme that is identical to the website theme, so the ad looks almost as part of the article.

I might try the other colour schemes just to see if ’standing-out’ will change CTR in any direction, but blending them in was the best thing I did.

XhacK

November 6, 2006 at 10:21 pm

hi
i dont have a blog yet but i`ll have one this week
i want to be the first lebanese blogger just like liew
i definitely agree with Andrew Grant about the date Icon!!
it`s really cool and drawing the readers eye to the adsense..
ur goal is to try to make ur visitor look to ur Ads,maybe trying to blending ur ads inside the LONG article is a good idea too.
hope to be friends..and keep the good work!!