I have to admit I thought I was good at AdSense ad placement already and have been selling AdSense templates (mainly for WordPress) for about 8 months, I get a lot of practice placing AdSense ad units and see the CTR from a lot of websites.
When you believe you know everything there is to know about a subject you’ve already made a serious mistake, so I’m always open to learning I’ve made a mistake.
Thought I had a Good AdSense CTR
I use AdSense on a lot of sites and over them all my CTR was around 1.7% for May 2008. An AdSense CTR of 1.7% isn’t particularly high, but this includes sites in niches that are just not going to result in a great deal of clicks (like Classic Literature, CTR below 1%!).
With this in mind I thought I was doing really well considering some of my sites/traffic. For example a site that gives me 5-6,000 impressions a day saw a CTR of around 2.7% for May and that’s an OK CTR.
Since I created the 45 Year Old Millionaire site I have been thinking a lot about how to make money from existing traffic. In some respects it’s easier to make more money from existing traffic than gaining new traffic, and if you can increase revenue without increasing traffic, when you do increase traffic your going to do even better.
It’s all in the Ad Unit Placement
I set about looking to see if I really had the best ad unit placement etc… for my AdSense ads. First thing I did was remove the border from around AdSense ad units, I used to have a border that matched the colour scheme of the site, but it does make an AdSense ad very ad like.
I considered it a trade off between revenue from AdSense and not destroying the user experience (blended, but not fully blended). I also assumed (I really have to stop making assumptions!) that the CTR difference between a bordered ad and a non bordered ad would be very small, (maybe a CTR increase of 0.1% which isn’t such a big deal) I was wrong!
Removing Borders from AdSense Ad Units Increased CTR
significantly
I don’t mind being wrong, in fact I embrace discovering a mistake since then I can rectify those mistake and in the case of marketing a website make more money.
I found after removing borders AdSense CTR increased by at least 1%! Yes, just one small change resulted in CTR increasing to 2.7% across the board! That’s a BIG increase in CTR and not the 0.1% I expected (glad I was wrong).
The site I mentioned earlier with a CTR of around 2.7% now had a CTR around 3.8% (a little more than 1% increase in CTR).
The AdSense Heat Map Again 
Cool, if I’ve made one big AdSense mistake like this one, maybe I’ve made more I can fix.
I went back to basics and took another look at my AdSense template themes and looked again at the AdSense heatmap (image to the right) and realised another possible mistake.
Usually my websites have a triangular ad unit layout as indicated by the AD 1 (250×250 unit), AD 2 (160×600 unit), AD 3 (336×280 unit) signs on the heat map to the right.
As you can see, this puts 2 ad units in the hot click areas, but one (the sidebar 160×600 ad unit) in the white/yellow (low CTR).
Having two ad units in the orange/red areas is good, but I was looking for great CTR so wanted all 3 ad units in the hot click areas.
I needed to try the sidebar 160×600 ad unit further up the page and on the left sidebar (many of my themes are right sidebar only, I like that design).
Fortunately I also have some WordPress themes with two sidebars (left and right) so could test this placement easily.
I tested this layout with the site I mentioned above that had just had it’s CTR increased to around 3.8% through removing the border.
To my surprise the CTR again increased significantly, this time to above 6%!!!!
Yes 6%, another 2%+ CTR from another relatively small change!!!
These two AdSense changes increased CTR for this one site with 5-6K impressions a day (which is a lot) by over 100%.
AdSense CTR of 6%
As I type this the site has had this layout for 8 days and other than yesterday when I had a server problem that caused my sites to be hard to access (might have had a hacking attempt on my server**) the CTR has remained around the high 5% to low 6% region (averaging just over 6% CTR).
**Yesterday CTR dropped to just under 5%, but think I can safely ignore that data due to the server problems and so the 6% average CTR is for the other 7 days (if I take this day into account CTR averages at just under 5.9%).
It’s early days for these changes, maybe next week they will drop, but I don’t think they will (will update the site in a week or two).
I plan to make similar changes to most of my sites and see if I can squeeze an extra 2% out of a few more sites. Will post my results here over time.
You’ll note I’ve got the 6% CTR layout on the 45 Year Old Millionaire site now
David Law
Note: for AdSense TOS reasons I’ve adjusted the CTRs a little (rather not have my AdSense account banned).
