8 years and still frustrated

My website has been up for 8 years. My SEO is good, #2 rank on Google for "word games".

Traffic is brisk at 92,000 uniques/month:

http://www.quantcast.com/wordplays.com

but I am earning very little. I cannot disclose the exact amount, but 2 of the ad agencies I use contacted me about low CTR. I've been able to juggle ads around and increase revenue, but that only seems to last a few days, then back to low returns.

I need some help, please.

 

Now THIS is an interesting situation you have here, I think. Mainly because so many of the earnings issues many publishers have are really issues of having low to no traffic to speak of, and they just need to create better content and much more of it to attract more users. But your problem is different; your traffic isn't converting.

Have you watched closely the ads that appear on your pages? Maybe it's a problem with the relevance of the ads that are showing up on your site. When I took a quick look at your site a moment ago, I clicked on the homepage link for "Crossword Helper". On that page, display ads for Spirit Airlines and Irwin Industrial Tools display; those don't strike me as ads that are very relevant to your content. They're also the most prominent ads, though Google AdSense ads also display that seem more relevant. But they're not very prominent.

I'd suggest using some of the AdSense formats that are proven as better performers, perhaps the 160x600 skyscraper ad formats.

Also -- do you use Google Analytics? That will help you decipher your traffic patterns, most popular content, and more, and perhaps help determine where you focus your efforts on ad placement.

 

Thanks for the reply. The Adsense ads are usually relevant, but the payout for online game ads is low.

I do better with the CPM ads. Even those ads are not relevant, they still earn more money than Adsense ads.

I get A LOT of default page views, 60-70%. I have tried everything to getaround this. I suspect this is a chicken and egg problem. The lower the CTR gets, the poorer ad quality gets. The less quality the ads, the more annoying the ads and the more likely visitors are to refresh the page or just leave the site.

I recently added yet another ad network to try to serve the defaults. Managing all these ad sizes and ad vendors is a major pain in the neck. It's practically impossible to keep up with filtering out audio and expanding ads. There's no time left to improve the site.

 

Why not try putting ads up on your site from the thenewsroom they pay CPM. And the good thing is they do not say how many ads you can use on a page so on 1 of my own sites i took away adsense and am using 10 ad blocks and making more.

 

Too many ads in my opinion. Your regulars might be getting annoyed. And your new visitors as well.

Too many ads can cause folks not to click any ads... since the site becomes almost spammy.

Plus you are running more than the allowed 3 per page for Adsense:

http://www.wordplays.com/fcgi-bin/scrabble.pl

I would try to cut it down to one well placed adsense ad. Get rid of the top and bottom banners, and stick with one well-integrated placement right next to or in your main content.

Just my 2 cents!

 

Thanks for this tip.

It is worth trying again. The 300x250 box in the middle pays the best. The top ad is #2. The The skyscraper on the left and the bottom ads don't pay well, I'll get rid of them.

I've done this before and I made a little bit less money, but it does make the site more usable. Suprisingly, keeping these ads doesn't really effect the traffic numbers.

 

Visited the site and unless I did something wrong I got this h t t p www(dot)wordplays(dot)com/p/index and the first ad I saw at the top was for making money with an online business and when I tried to click somewhere a "clicksor" ad came up...the spelling may be wrong because it came up quickly and disappeared and I can't seem to get it to happen again. If you have a main url I can enter in, and come up with entry page, I can give you some advice, if you are open to it.

Sorry, my post count is too low to post links...

 

Also, I noticed you are using Casale Media for CPM? If you haven't already, try signing up with TribalFusion. I think they pay a better CPM than you are probably getting with Casale. Just a hunch!

 

I think with your traffic you can't expect to make more than $1,000/month in ad revenue. This type of traffic simply isn't worth much. If you had 92K uniques a month looking for real estate info you could make $10K easy. But word games... $1K would be a good payout.

 

Yes, I am using Casale but they are last in the chain of defaults. They don't pay well. I probably would do better showing a blank, as it would be less distracting and I wouldn't be giving up too much in the way of revenue.

I just started using Clicksor yesterday. Their technology seems a little flaky, they are paying better than Casale but not by much. I'll give them a week or two before I decide whether to keep them.

I think 'korzon' may be right, I've come not to expect too much from this site. Maybe what am getting is all I should ever expect to get. Time to move to Real Estate, or Stock Options. (optionistics.com) is another one of my sites, it gets excellent CPM, fair CTR, but the traffic doesn't come close to wordplays.com.

Thanks for all the feedback

 

if you don't mind annoying your visitors you should try thenewsroom you can make over $1000 a month if you use the video feed with auto play.

 

Try listing your site on ad exchanges and get CPM deals. Check out traffiq dot com.