Abysmal CTR - placement issues or irrelevant content?

I have a blog/site at http://www.infernalramblings.com with a really horrid CTR. I have this feeling that the main reason for this is that I'm writing for a Malaysian audience, and that most of my readers are Malaysian, so most of the ads they see won't be relevant. (Whatever the case, it seems to me that a lot of the ads I get seem to be quite irrelevant to my content.)

I know that the typical way to boost relevancy would be to utilise headers and have a greater keyword density, etc., but I've been reluctant to really change my writing style (especially since I don't see how it can be too bad). I wondered if blocking MFA sites would boost earnings, but I didn't see a noticeable uptick after adding them to my filters.

Another issue might be placement. Until last month, I was using one leaderboard at the top and another below, and this naturally yielded terrible results. (I still use a similar style for my site's forum because I can't think of a better way to do things without messing up the forum design.) I finally figured out that skyscrapers and large rectangles were the better way to go, so last month I began using those for my articles, and there's been an improvement. My clickthrough rate is now hovering between 0.5% and 1%, which is a lot better from the near-zero it once was.

Until recently, I wasn't too unhappy with this, especially since people tended to click on high-value ads (I could earn almost $4 from 20 clicks), but although my CTR has stayed roughly constant, I've noticed a recent fall in eCPM (possibly from smart pricing). Since I'm regressing to the mean, which is probably less than 20 cents per click, I figure I need to boost my CTR.

It's particularly frustrating since a lot of people indicate that the norm is closer to 4% or the like, so I was wondering if placement might still be the issue. Could anyone help me see if I could further optimise my site? In case you missed it, the URL is http://www.infernalramblings.com

Thanks, all.

 

It just occurred to me that the colour scheme of my site might have something to do with the low CTR. Should I change the colours of my ads? Any ideas guys?

 

There are tooooo many links on your page... If you want more money from adsense, you should have less links other than adsense on your pages. As well, try to blend them as much as possible. Try to change the URL link from light orange to black as well.

 

Too many links? Well, if they were external ones, yeah, they'd probably be bad for revenue, but I don't see anything too wrong about internal ones. (I intentionally don't keep a blogroll, etc. because of this.) My idea is that as long as people want to stay on my site, I'll keep them there, but any way *off my site* almost certainly has to be through an ad.

Btw, the ad in the top left corner isn't the only one I have - there's a wide skyscraper at the bottom of the sidebar and a large rectangle at the bottom of each page. (My individual blog posts/articles have a slightly different format.) I use the default colour scheme for all of them, except for the ad in the top left corner, which I used the orange for since I thought it was *too* blended.

By default, the URL is green - should I change it to black for all my ads? Thanks for the help.

 

Too many links on a page means the visitor's attention to be distributed. Yes, if internal, this is ok, but take care, not too much...

Yes, you should change it to black for your ads as your visitors not to observe those are really ads... Also, try to put some text around your ads. Thus, they will be blended with the text. Have a look over this page for example: http://www.e-articles.info/e/a/title/Guidelines-on-how-to-get-spider-friendly-content-pages/

 

I don't think the links are really a problem. Just my opinion though.

Anyways, I suggest you try putting an adbox inside the actual content part of the site (the middle column).

It might draw more attention to the ads.

I avoid looking at ads on the right and left columns as they are generally a waste of time. Middle column ads sometimes catch my interest though.

 

Thanks for the ideas, guys. I already have a large rectangle in the centre column for my articles, which are the meat of my content and where most visitors end up (since I promote my articles on forums and blogs). Still, the CTR for the large rectangle isn't that great - just around 1%. Any ideas on how I could boost this figure? Is there a way I could further blend it in?

Thanks again for the help - I'll try to implement some stuff tomorrow.

 

Okay, I tried to make the ads in the outer areas contrast more by making the links red. I moved the vertical banner to the left corner of the centre column for category pages, and made the URL text black for all ads. Is this an improvement? I'm hoping results will improve.

This is an example category page (sorry, can't do inline links yet): http://www.infernalramblings.com/articles/

By the way, any ideas on fixing up the CTR for my inline large rectangle on article pages? This is one example page: http://www.infernalramblings.com/articles/General/94/

Yesterday I had 262 impressions of this ad - and just 1 click.