Sundance

Hi

My latest changes to the way I manage my sites has been very simple but effective. It is amazing how small tweaks to CSS and adsense can completely alter your click-through rate (CTR).

People tend to ask for the formula for successful ads. Of course there is none - the number of factors involved in each individual site (colour scheme, font, topic, ad position etc) are far too great. What is important is just to spend some time looking at your site. Open pages of your site and see where your eyes naturally land.

For example, I once removed a news fader display from one of my sites and instantly upped my click through rate by about 25%. No rocket science there: readers had a choice of looking at my content, my fader, and my ads, and the ads were coming a poor third.

My recent changes have been more subtle. All I have done is changed the font size of my subheadings and dates. Their previous large font was just making the ads fade too much into the background. Although just a few days is not really enough to gage success, again my click through rate seems to have increased, this time by a much smaller 5-10%.

But remember, small increases (or indeed decreases!) make a big difference over the long-term. Looking at the smallest scale, ad revenue of $1 a day gives $365 dollars a year. Revenue of $1.10 a day (a 10% increase) gives you $401.50 a year. Not a bad increase for what is only five minutes work. Just to take that to ridiculous lengths, if it takes 5 minutes to change some CSS, and that makes you $35 in a year, than that means your hourly rate for that time was 6X35, which equals $210 an hour! Not bad :-)

Anyway, look at your blog or site and assess what changes you can make, easily reversible tweaks, to see an increase it CTR.