How I Doubled My Adsense CTR Instantly

Posted by Paul B | September 8, 2008 .

Disclaimer: - This may not work for you, it is dependent on your website layout (please see the bottom explanation) and your audience, basically if you target visitors that don’t click ads this isn’t going to help!

As I hinted at last week I’ve spent a lot of time playing around with Adsense recently. It is just so easy to get to a point where you are earning what you want and then stop trying. This is the road to ruin, in this business if you’re not going forward then you are going backwards, there is no such thing as staying still.

So What Did I Do?
For each of my high traffic domains I did the same thing, for the home page I created 3 Adsense channels, one for the menu, one for a wide Adsense ad and one for a square. I then spent time rotating the positions, combinations and colours of each ad making sure that I made a note of everything in a spreadsheet. The reason for using the home page was simple, I needed enough traffic to make my results statistically significant. To achieve this I was working on 5,000+ ad impressions for each combination.

What Did I Find Out?
My favourite Adsense combination (that had been proved during some old experiments) was to have a blended style wide menu block about a blended banner at the top of the page. This was far and away my most common ad layout. However I soon discovered that I could double my CTR by altering this. Just removing the banner from underneath the menu made a significant difference to the menu CTR, from 2-3% to well over 6%.

I then experimented with where to put another ad block. I tried moving that banner but had little joy, then I implemented my square ad in the content. I tried a right hand position first (blended) and did ok. I then tried left (blended) and it increased significantly, I was averaging around 7% CTR from both ad units on that page. In terms of positioning that was my best combination, a menu unit just below the sites main navigation at the top of the page and then a 250×250 square in a floating div positioned left in the main content. Both ads were using the same link colour as the rest of the site.

Then I started messing with the colours. First of all I totally changed to something that really stood out, that only had a negative effect. Then I went for the old faithful, white blended background, standard blue link text. Straight away there was another 2-3% increase in the CTR of both ad units. This held out for the entire duration of that test. I did try several other combination (including adding a banner at the bottom of the page) but nothing topped the success of my blue ads. The end result of all this has been a significant increase in Adsense income. One I had my winning combination I rolled it out to every single page on that site. To take things even further I looked at my other sites that had a similar layout and implemented the same with almost identical “doubling up” results.

My Site Layout
What I must stress is that this has only worked on websites with a similar layout. You can see I’ve tried it on my blog and the results haven’t been the same. Where this has worked for me is on websites that have a single row top menu (under which goes the wide link unit) and a left hand sub/main menu. As far as colours are concerned it doesn’t seem to matter. The sites on which my blue ads are performing so well are of various colours, even the non advertising links featured range from black, orange, green all the way to red. On all tests it was the adverts as “normal link” blue that performed best.

As an overall rule I think the key to my success here has been to put some lovely blue links right where the average web user expects to find the navigation. Who knows, it may even help having my other links a non standard colour as well? I’m going to run with this ad combination here until I’ve got enough data to prove that it’s not working and then I’m going to spend a little time finding a winning combination for the “average” blog layout. I’ve got my Adsense combination nailed for content sites, not it’s time to improve my blogs Adsense performance.

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2 Comments so far

Ian September 13, 2008 9:02 am

Thanks for the tip. Makes me think I need to play around with the adsense on my site.

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godaddy hosting sucks September 14, 2008 2:30 am

Paul, I think I’m going to implement that menu adsense thing - I haven’t until now because I fear the decreased clickthrough rate since it’ll show up on my homepage………………but since I’m gearing up to selling the site, every adsense dollar is huge. hopefully it works. thanks for the expt.

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