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 Section targetting, 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?