Senserely Click Through Ratings

Submitted by 5DollarsADay on Thu, 2007-08-30 20:48. adsense | click through | design | senserely

Senserely has to one of the ugliest sites on the web. All it’s missing is a few animated gifs and meaningless links to an under construction sign, yet despite it’s hideous color scheme and mess of a layout, the click through rating from Senserely is one of my highest.

Now Google’s terms of services forbids me from giving the details of all my click throughs, but lets just say that if all my other pages had the same click through percentage as Senserely, I could take a couple extra vacations a year.

My sites cover topics that are technical (really low click throughs), business related(not too bad), or about just plain junk (about the same as business). I tried out this blog just as a test. I posted a couple of my old junk posts to see how they did. The traffic here isn’t much to brag over, but some of the posts exceed what the value of those on my well designed and organized site just because the click throughs.

Maybe I should just throw good design in the garbage. Maybe when people get here they’re so confused, the find the quickest way out (by clicking on an ad).

Your ad here, right now, for as low as $0.10

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Hi, I thought it was THE

Submitted by james on Thu, 2007-08-30 21:09.

Hi, I thought it was THE ugliest, so you know worst ones? :-)
Joke aside, you’ll notice there’re two different ad placements on senserely, one is for content pages, such as this one where the adsense blocks are blended within the content, or as a menu, etc. Blended.
The other is for all general pages such as the homepage, there you have the winning formula, I don’t do it for nothing, you put all you’ve got above the fold and see your CTR rise. Of course some are saying, yeah but it’s not user friendly, blablabla, ok then remove your adsense from your page so it will be user friendly.
I mean you have to make choice in life, either you’re earning money with adsense either you’re playing with adsense and will complain about low CTR.

There are other types of ad placement that I use on my sites, but as a general rule, for higher CTR put all you’ve got above the fold, the user shouldn’t have to scroll down to click on any of your ads. The only thing left should be maybe a google search box at the bottom of the page because you can put 2 and the first one would already be where people look for it: top right corner.

Cheers,
James
Let Me Give You 15 Dollars…

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I’m experimenting with a

Submitted by 5DollarsADay on Thu, 2007-08-30 21:25.

I’m experimenting with a similar method on one of my new sites. I’ve traditionally worried about getting visitors first and then put money second, but I end up putting so much time into that the monetary rewards rarely make up for the effort.

I wonder how much traffic will get sacrificed due to poor “user friendliness”. There’s got to be some hypothetically perfect middle ground where people think your site is professional enough to keep coming back, but can’t help but click on ads.

Just out of curiosity, and since you have access to the server logs, how much traffic for an article comes from search engines and how much comes from people that were already on Senserely and then just browsed through the blog entries.

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I’m sorry I don’t

Submitted by james on Fri, 2007-08-31 00:02.

I’m sorry I don’t analyse this kind of data, all I have at hand is a public tracker which you’re welcome to see to witness how low the traffic is to senserely, this is unique visitors:
http://extremetracking.com/open;unique?login=senserel

you can click on referrer traffic 1 to know where people are coming from.

I really need to get some motivation and work on senserely, because ever since the hacking back in august 2006 some things have been screwed up, and my current web host is shit, it’s producing server error, like when you click on keyword (near the title of the blog post) it wasn’t doing that before, and it kills the purpose of keywords which was to create additional pages for the search engines to send traffic to, now it’s server error, I have to motivate myself and change host for a better one, which I use now for all my new sites.

Cheers,
James
Let Me Give You 15 Dollars…

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