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With a total of 130 page impressions on Sunday, I had absolutely no clicks on my AdSense. I was really surprised about this, and I’m sure you are too. This is why trying different placements is absolutely essential in optimizing your AdSense earnings. In an effort to better my placement and avoid intrusion on content, I’ve decided to add a horizontal leaderboard on top. Hopefully, this will result in a better (or actual) CTR.
Popularity: 1% [?]
I steered away from using a leaderboard in the header of my blog mainly due to the aesthetical viewpoint, it doesn’t really look all that inviting just having a load of ads. And to be frank, the link units converted a lot better for me than the leaderboards.
But maybe that’s different for you – just keep testing until you’ve found a stage where you’re making money but your ads are still nicely positioned and formatted (in terms of colours) to suit the design of the rest of your site.
Good luck and I hope your CTR picks up.
Yeah, you’re right. I guess what works for one site doesn’t work for another. I just placed the leaderboard on top because according to Google’s heatmap, that’s one of the most ideal places to put it to get a high CTR. I’ll try it out for a couple weeks and see what happens. Thanks for the input.
How many page impressions do you usually expect to earn at least one click? If you’re getting upset with that many page views and no clicks then perhaps I need a better strategy as well!
I guess I was over reacting a bit. I have yet to reach 1000 impressions a day so little or no clicks shouldn’t be that surprising. For December, I had about 1530 page impressions and only ten clicks.
Rohail – I’ve noticed that with my blog I got a bad CTR compared to SportsLizard…mostly (in my mind) because most of my readers use AdSense and block it out. You’re much more likely to see success from AdSense on a site like SportsLizard where “average” internet browsers looking for sports collectibles don’t know or understand AdSense. As much as I enjoy your blog, I probably will never click on an AdSense ad because I block it out. It’s nothing personal, but maybe some other types of advertising (selling text links or something) would be more profitable.
Hey Adam,
Your comment makes a ton of sense. I didn’t start this blog to make money off of it, so I shouldn’t consider that to be my aim now. I’m much more happy about having readers than a couple cents in my AdSense every day. Thanks to anyone who gave me any “pity clicks” if that’s what they were. I have to re-focus this blog though.
Rohail, this should give you some comfort – when I ran adsense on my website till about a month ago, at times I had thousands of impressions and not a single click
, so get used to it 
I got frustrated at times and also wrote a post about it:
http://www.thetaoofmakingmoney.com/2006/09/18/36.html
There are some lessons there, if you read carefully.
Concentrate on your blog matter, get a good back links, get a good page rank…and then adsense will start showing some effect.
To encourage you, I know of very reliable and honest people who make thousands on Adsense every month…but they virtually spend their entire waking time with the blog and have absolutely great content.
I don’t run adsense anymore because I have simply stopped liking it…and it makes less than peanuts for me
Golbguru: Wow, I’m kind of surprised. I’m no where near 1000 impressions a day. I would have thought that would have garnered you at least ten or so clicks a day. AdSense is tricky though. I’m learning more about it now and realizing it was a bit premature to complain about since this blog hasn’t reach any major growth yet. I read your post and it seems like we’ve hit similar road blocks with our little AdSense experiment. For the time being, I’ve removed most of the ads since it’s not providing any real value and also because my readership took a hit based on the feedburner count. Thanks for the reassurance and for making me see the light.
Rohail, I suggest you try the links ad on the right navigation, as high up as you can. You may be surprised as how that will do for you.
Also, (and I know you didn’t ask for this, but I’ll comment on it anyway) your header is taking up too much of your valuable space. See if you can shrink the height of your header to about half of what you have now, so people can see your content sooner.
Regards,
Adriana
That’s a really good suggestion, Adriana. I will move the TLA ads up as high as possible.
As for the header, I’m not quite sure how to edit it. But you’re right, I think I could get a lot more content above the fold if I shrunk the header a bit. I’ll try and figure out how to do that. Thanks for the input.
- Rohail