Increased CPM and CTR by 300%

I've always tried to position my ads with the reader in mind some what (I'd rather have regular readers than make a quick buck bombarding them with ads). Traffic for me is now at a level where I thought it would be interesting to see the effect of different ad formats and placement.

In order not to upset regular readers I only show the more optimised ads to visitors reffered from search engines.

This is how my normal ad positioning (a 468x60 at the top of every blog post):


For visitors from search engines I replace that ad with a 336x280:


I've been running it like this for about a month now and the results to me have been pretty impressive. The CPM and CTR on the 336x280 ads is over 4 times higher than my regular ads. Some of this I put down to the type of visitor (i.e. a visitor from a search engine is more likely to click an ad than a regular reader) but a lot of it is down to the ad type.

The main downside to this is that I'm losing some search engine traffic before they have a chance to browse around (and hopefully bookmark) the site and I'll also be losing out on a bit of affiliate income due them leaving the site early, but overall income is certainly up (more so than normal for this time of year).

 

Interesting to read this. So can we make the conclusion from your story that large rectangle ads make more money ? I have also read somewhere that large rectangle is the most paying ad format.

 

Nice improve, too bad for the lost of that traffic but hey...We all know how adsense work, to win a few cents, sometimes that visitor is lost...:/

 

If it was a only a few cents I'd of stopped it a while ago but my the income from that ad position is up by over $100 a day so I don't mind losing some visitors earlier than I normally would.

 

That's true. I found 336x280 is the best too.

 

Awesome! Thanks for sharing..and including screenshots.

 

336 by 280 and other large squares work best.

 

I find they work best with regards to clicks but can often make a site look a bit too ad centric, for me the main trick is only showing them to a subset of my visitors without annoying regular visitors.

 

I would do the same 100$ a day increase just by changing the ad format is great, keep it up.

I agree. I don't like that square cause of that but it seems to work great to many people...Someday i gotta give it a try.

 

adsense help says a similar think too. adsense says 336*280 most clicked ads format

 

Wow, good information. I'm definitely going to take your advice.

 

hello dct,

what's your daily traffic like in order to get $100/day ?

that's a figure most of us can only dream of ...

cheers ...

 

~15K uniques but the extra $100 is from ~10K (I only show that ad format to a subset of my visitors)

Anybody can get to that level (and beyond), it just takes practise, time and persistence.

 

thanx dct for your info .... i guess it's true that you need tons of traffic as that's the basic ingredients in generating more income .... how i hope i can get those type of traffic ...

cheers
http://stocktube.blogspot.com

 

I am not surprised at all that the new ad format resulted in a larger CTR, there is after all a greater chance a visitor will click. You can't really compare the two different ad units as one servers more ads than the other.

A good comparison would be two 468x60 ad units as opposed to a single 336x280 unit

 

What code do you use to display the different ads depending on if they come from search engine or not?

 

totoros.. you can use php script to detect agent type and display ads accordingly.. or you can use javascript to detect agent type too...

the ads looks really nicely integrated and 336*280 is the safest bet if you aint sure what works..