Originally Posted by handsome rob

Ok let me ask a few questions then...

1. What draws the most SE traffic... your homepage or post pages?

2. Have you tried different ad blocks?

3. Have you always had so many ads on your site? You've got a lot at the moment.

Political blog readers are becoming just as ad-blind as tech blog readers, but that still doesn't explain why your CTR is so abysmal. Your layout is all black and white, which probably isn't helping your situation. If it were me, and I'm not an adsense publisher, I would have put one banner below the post title, one banner in the body of the post, and one skyscraper in the sidebar. I'd also drop the adbrite and that other thing that takes you to another page where you have to click "Skip this ad". Those things are more obnoxious than popups.

1) the SE traffic i get is overwhelmingly to the post pages, not the homepage. I have noticed an upswing in the amount of SE traffic I have been getting... i'd say its maybe 4th or 5th in line, behind Reddit.com/StumbleUpon/wikipedia... and a few others in there that i draw traffic from as well... but the SE traffic is increasing.

2) ive tried alot of things, and what you see now is the height of my experiments. I've been trying to see what works and what doesnt work. Right now, none of it is really working... I suppose that since the majority of my traffic has been from Reddit, this might explain my extremely low CTR... but Still, why has adsense tracker been reporting so many clicks/page views that google never reports....
even mybloglog.com reports clicks that google never reports in my adsense account.

3) No, at first, and up untill a few days ago it was Only adsense. I got accepted into a few others and promptly put them up... right now there are far too many ads, I need to figure out what I want to stick with and stick to it... but that has been easier said than done.

I appreciate your input.
I too have considered dropping the intersitial (the one that makes you "skip this"), as it is a pain in the ***... I did like the idea of being paid based on the amount of Views, rather than the clicks... but im not so sure its worth it.
I bet I lose some traffic right there at that screen, "skip this ad"....
You said "one banner below the post title, one banner in the body of the post, and one skyscraper in the sidebar"... this is basically what I have, is it not? well, other than the adsense directly under the header.

Ahhhhh this **** is frustrating.

I've always found Adsense to be pretty good. I run a large forum which is subject to large traffic spikes from time to time, yet my earnings rise to an extent I am still happy with, and the CTR remains similar.

it you get large amounts of traffic then you cant beat it.

if you do some test and work out your ROI or in laymans terms the best things to put on your site that takes the least amount of time to set up you will come up with a winner.

it is always good to test many things first but.

Awstats is very inaccurate, sorry to break it to you but you're not getting that many uniques. For example, if your avatar on this site is hosted on YOUR site, it will count every load as a unique. At least that's what I've heard.

IMO it's because you have a full page ad that people have to click past before your site loads.

Most probably close the window without even reaching your site.

good point, dave
but those ads your talkin' about, the intersitial ads,
i just recently put them up.

the traffic explosion and click conspiracy stuff happened before those ads in particular ever made it to the site.
i guess things are sort of back to normal, at this point. im not getting as much traffic as i was, and the clicks appear to be leveling out.

but there for roughly a week, i was getting +10k visitors every day, and trackers where reporting way more clicks than adsense... Now, they report almost the exact same stats.

I read one of your posts where you say you smoke a couple of joints - my advice would be to lay oof hte grass and maybe your paranoia will go away.

Install the google analytics and see how many uniques that tells you - I find it quiet accurate seeing as most my visitors do come from google anyway.

:lol: yea your probably right.