I was just wondering what people's CTR is with adsense

I was getting 10% (ish) until they changed the active click area

Now it seems to be about 6.5%.

These two figures are based on one adsense block (large square) floated top-right of a few hundred words of content

Putting another adblock (wide skyscraper) to the left of the content seemed to lower the CTR

Was wondering if there were any new optimisation tips people had come across

I boast on average less than 2.5% so from where i'm sitting you're looking pretty

but have you tried to incorporate a horizontal block in between the content? Just a thought

I'm reluctant to add ad blocks, as it decreases the overall monetary value of the page

if I have 4 ads then I'm displaying the 4 highest paying bidders (i'm talking generically, so don't haul me over on the quality score concept). Yesterday my average click price was $0.52 (usually on target at $0.30).

If I add another 4 ads to the page, I am showing less valuable ads - when i tried the vertical block, the average CPC was $0.16 (half the target CPC). In this case the extra ads need to cause a doubling of CTR to break even - possibly not worth it.

I've tried putting affiliate ads on from clickbank and amazon - but these did nothing! The adsense revenues actually went up when I took the affiliate ads off.

In theory then - maybe i should make the pages more minimalistic.............oh, well.......i'll see what happens

Northie wrote:

I was just wondering what people's CTR is with adsense

Hi Northie, its been a while. No I was not in prison, but its good to be back. You might recall my website (sig) when it was all blue and a mess. I put it up for a review and went to css to help things (thanks ColoEagle). My ctr on the site was terrible so I have changed the site to this new format (sig).

I have other niche sites as well and changed around the background colours quite a lot, so no 2 are the same just to do some testing on colours aesthetics etc.

I noticed an immediate increase in the ctr % when I made the change. Before I was lucky to get a click anywhere near 2% whereas now it hovers around the 20% plus mark, some days more.

I thought by having more units the ctr would drop and it did. But the other day for a niche keyword to do with self improvement of the mind, I got a $2.01 click.

So my experience has been more means more, not less is more. Hard to judge looking at my experience compared to yours.  I'm going with the adage "blend them in" which I reckon means "make em stick out, you can't click what you can't see".

hey Terry- I had a similar experience...

Northie wrote:

I'm reluctant to add ad blocks, as it decreases the overall monetary value of the page

i tested that on another site:  I remove 2 blocks per page, and switched my only remaining 1 with a 234x60 banner so i would only display 1 ad per page

The clicks on that 1 ad paid the same as the clicks on the pages that hosted many ads= roughly 15-20 cents

However i got fewer clicks

so for me...in the end it was better to have 3 ad blocks

but that could just be me (and other factors could be very different between your and my site- so my experience  can't be an overall conclusion)

anyone else try this?