The site in my signature (Search Engine Friendly Layouts) generates a pretty fair amount of traffic for a new site (and I have some ideas for additional traffic), generates interest and positive feedback, and seems to generate clickthroughs on the ads (since I know I'm not supposed to reveal the CTR, I won't).

The problem is that the ads themselves are, quite frankly, crap from what I've seen. Since I'm not allowed to click the ads myself for oblivious reasons, I can't always tell but from what I can tell I seem to be attracting the kind of get-rich-quick low-quality crap that I really don't want.

Basically, I just want some decent advertisers that pay around $0.50 per more CPC and I'd be happy. I may be biased, but I think the site deserves it since it's something relatively unique and appeals to what I'd consider to be a pretty niche market.

So...how do I make this thing make some bling bling? (I wanted to rhyme.)

The only way you can get a better CPC is keyword stuffing, which I really don't recommend since you'll get banned and it'll make your website look bad!

Unfortunately you really can't just get a better CPC like that.

Instead, if I were you I'd concentrate on increasing your CTR. What's your current CTR? I'd imagine it's quite low - without pretending the ads are part of the links or anything, you should merge them in as much as possible. Otherwise, people just sort of filter them out and don't even read them!

Good luck

I know I'm not supposed to say the exact CTR, but it's over 1%. It's the ads themselves that suck.

When I visited I got good topical ads. They were for related things like JavaScript, CSS, and AJAX. There was one for Dice.com. Maybe it just took Google a little while to decide which kind of ads should be on your site and the get-rich-quick kind are their default, that's just a guess though.

When I went to your site Adsense delivered 4 ads on SEO....A service that you are offering from your main menu. This is giving your potential customers an exit from your site????? Maybe not a good idea?

Cheers,

Roland

http://www.filter-source.com

Adam I think I first caught you talking about this site over at WMW in a thread you started about how fast you've gotten PR if I remember correctly. Since I didn't respond there I'll just say congrats on the quick traffic.

The CPC is going to be based on the keywords so you may just have to live with it a little, but I think there are a few of things you can try. Google always uses the highest CPC ads in your first set of AdSense code so having less AdSense blocks means the overall CPC for the ads on your site should be higher. If you set up channels for the different ad blocks you can tell which one has the better CTR and just go with that.

Google also allows you to tell them where to start and stop looking at your text to determine what ads to show. It's called section targeting and I think it will take a week or so after you add the code before it takes effect.

If you have an idea of which ads are low paying you can also block them when you login to AdSense. They let you block up to 200 urls, though I'm not sure how you determine which are the low paying ads.

If you use Firefox there's an extension called AdSense Preview that you can use to see what ads will most likely be displayed on a given page. I've compared it to the actual ads and while not perfect it does a good job. You can click on the AdSense Preview ads without it affecting the real ads so there's no problem with Google.

Thanks, vangogh. If nothing else, I can honestly say I've put forth a good effort on this (and there's more coming once I get this straightened away). So far, most of the feedback has been positive.

I noticed the section targeting page, and I'm going to play around a bit with it in the next couple of days since I've got a 3-day weekend of sorts to do so. I'm going to see if filtering out certain sections will make any real difference whatsoever.

I thought about going with a single ad block too, but this begs the question: with fewer ads on a given page, does that mean the CPC for each ad would be higher in turn? Like does too many ads dilute it, even though it may mean a higher CTR? I honestly wouldn't mind if my CTR were 1-1.5% if the CPC was in the $0.50 to $1.00 range. I'd be fine with that, and at the risk of sounding biased, I don't think that a CPC in that range is all that unreasonable.

I've been using the channels for my various ad sizes, as well as the pages containing the layouts vs. the ones that don't. So I know pretty well that the large rectangle is the highest-paying size as well as the one that generates the highest CTR (I would have thought the skyscrapers would have worked best, but I guess I was wrong.)

JeremiahB: I've noticed that most of the ads seem to be topical. But a few people have pointed out that when they clicked on an ad, they were taken somewhere useless (one guy I don't even know emailed me all pissed off because he ended up on some scraper or popup site or something, although he never thought to give me the link.) And from what I can see, the JS ones tend not to pay quite as well.

Mind you, with what vangogh has given me, I think I've got something I can work with as far as filtering out the important parts and the unimportant parts.

Roland, you're referring to the other site in my sig. And normally, you'd be totally right. Under 99.9% of circumstances, ads for even potential competitors don't belong on a sales site. I've said the same thing too many times myself.

The weird thing about my situation is that I'm not looking to pick up business right now. I've got enough customers, and for the first time in a long time I'm not even close to struggling month-to-month. It makes my AdSense income pursuit almost academic in a sense.

So, I actually don't want to pick up any more customers right now, as stupid as that sounds. In fact, I've even posted as such on my Contact page and taken my quote request form down. I want no more customers than what I have right now. And if I can't take them on, they're going to go to a competitor anyway. I might as well direct them somewhere (or at least have Google do it) and make something off the deal.

Does that make sense, or does that sound strange?

Adam it makes perfect sense. There's a point beyond which you can't provide the same quality of service and you'll either need to hire someone to take on the new customers or possibly lose some of your existing customers.

For my own site I'm not looking to get rich off the AdSense though I certainly wouldn't complain if that happened. I'm hoping to simply generate another revenue stream for my business that at the least will pay a few bills or provide some money for advertising. My CTR is in line with yours, but my traffic is lacking at the moment so that's where my efforts are going at the moment.

I haven't played around too much with the ads other than a minor tweak or two just out of curiosity. I've been wanting to do a redesign of my site and thought I'd wait for that before experimenting with the layout, etc of the ads since I'll likely be doing that again with the new look. That is assuming I can find the time for the redesign.

I would have thought your skyscraper ads would do well too. They blend pretty well and are in one of the supposedly ideal locations. I remember not too long ago seeing another skyscraper on the right which I'm guessing didn't perform too well.

They work in terms of clickthroughs...just not in terms of conversion. Then again, they're the "second" ad unit, and as someone mentioned earlier, apparently big G tends to put higher-paying ads in the first unit.

Anyway, done some adjustments and tweaking here and there. The Layouts pages were all redone (so that pictures of the layouts show). It seemed to help in terms of advertisers. They look a little better than before.

We shall see, we shall see, though.

The images look good. Makes it easier to see what each layout is going to be. I see you dropped the skyscraper and are going with two of the rectangles.

Let us know if it works.

Yeah Google does show the highest CPC ads first so having less total ads should in theory drive the average CPC up some.

On some of the pages, I did. Some of them, I still need to keep them until I can figure out what to do with the left side of the page, or on pages where the content isn't long enough to justify two rectangles but fits a rectangle and a skyscraper.

Anyway, I'll keep everyone posted as I go through this. Thanks all for the help. Any other suggestions, feel free to keep 'em comin'.

Have you ever tried using the link units ads? The ones that where the first click takes you to the results page that requires another click before you get any credit. I know they can be blended very well in to a design and I've heard they generate a pretty good CTR. I'm not sure if the CPC is any higher or lower though than the regular ads.

i think its your ad placement. use the google heat map found here >> https://www.google.com/support/adsen...page=tips.html

blend your ads to match your site's look and feel. remove the borders.

als try using adlinks under your nav. i have seen an increase of 20% in revenue with adlinks.

jmaresca: I think you're looking at the first site. Quite frankly, I don't care all that much happens with it.

In the second is where the problems lie. If you look, the placement of the ads is pretty close to what the heat map suggests.

ah, i see. the second site looks real good. are you getting a good number of impressions.

i think you may want to add half banners within the actual article copy. this seems to work real well.

UPDATE:

I'm starting to see better-paying advertisers based on average PPC. So I think whatever was bugging Big G about my site seems to be straightened out now.

So...all I need to do is get my *** some more traffic. Yay more traffic!

Congrats Adam. I'm in the same boat. Working on getting that traffic.

your ad blending is quite good indeed