I think I should be making a lot more, placement or something else?

Hello All,

I run the site MyAdopts.com and I use AdSense. I need some help as I've been using AdSense on the site and I've got lots and lots of pageviews, but very few clicks.

About the site: The site is about virtual pets, basically it's geared towards kids and allows them to create their own virtual pet site. I show the ads on hosted virtual pet sites as well as on the support forums.

An example ad placement would be like it is on this user's site:
http://www.cielbeach.myadopts.com/
http://www.cielbeach.myadopts.com/adopt.php

Now, my dilemma is that in a given day, Google says I have thousands of impressions, but I may only get a few clicks, such as yesterday's stats for me:

13,534 Page Impressions
5 Clicks
0.04% CTR
$0.09 CPM
$1.18 Earnings

I've also got some placement issues, such as:

1. I want to have ads without the site seeming too commercial, especially as the site is geared towards kids. What is the best way to place ads to accomplish this? I don't want to plaster a giant ad at the top so it is the first thing a user sees, but I still want to make money.

2. The ads are all placed on pages with user-generated content. The problem is that sometimes users do not add content to a page that displays an ad, or they add little content. What does Google consider to be a page with content? I have my site coded so I can not show ads on certain pages, and I don't show them on pages such as the login page, account page, etc. Thus I am limited to where I can place the ad I believe.

3. How much does color affect the ad? Each site can control their own CSS colors as well as site template, so how is that affecting my ads and revenue and what can be done, if anything about this?

Any help would be appreciated. Do you think my earnings are normal, or is there something certainly wrong there? I'm new to AdSense so I don't know if this is normal, or...?

BMR777

 

You have good traffic that's a good start. But sad to say, can't view your ads... Need to register. Maybe you post pic of it instead.

 

Hmm, that's odd. You shouldn't need to register or make a site to view the ads. I'll have to look into this, thanks for pointing this out.

 

hmm .. i cant see any ads on your site dude ...

 

1. You really have to move your adsense ads at the top of the page. You won't get too commercial with that.

2. not being able to display ads on login page is a good thing in fact; since you have user generated content your ads will try to match the content the best way possible

3. color should be your last concern, except for the cases where the ads blend too much with the site; to avoid this, you should leave the image and text option enabled.

your ctr is amazingly low, it might take you a lot of time to recover this lost ground. since you can not control the content you can not control the ads and therefore you can't have control on your adsense earnings.

if you think is it worth the time to go on, then go on, but if you could use this time to do anything else better, than you should think about it.

as long as your ctr does not improve you'll also have low cpc.

good luck!

 

Thanks for the replies.

We were having server issues earlier so the ads may not have appeared due to that.

@Earner's Vision - Is there any way to set at least a "ballpark" audience for the ads that appear? I'm trying to get ads targeted to my audience, mainly kids, to appear, but on some sites, especially those with minimal content generic or unrelated ads seem to appear, such as for credit cards. I've tried using meta tags and that has helped some, but is there any way to really target the ads without having the content consistent on every page?

Also, does Google take into account the content of the site as a whole, or simply what's on the page currently displaying the ad?

 

Now I can see your Adsense which is in Forums.
Instead of putting the ads under the first post, you can make it inside the first post; and make it top-right.
Hope this will help a little
Another one, I see your adsense has blue links, you might want to make the link color same with your current active link color, also the background try to make it same as your post's background