Would love a site review on my new site

Hi there,

I've just finished the ad-integration of my new site,

URL: www.freiburg-home.com

It's about Freiburg in Germany for English-Speaking visitors and tourists.

The biggest problem I have is that I do get quite a lot of visitors (for such a niche website) but only around 1 click a day on average. Sometimes none and sometimes 2. I would love to increase this CTR.

I cannot supply average unique visitors stats as this number is increasing every day, yesterday was 220, not many I know, but today is already 200 and it's only 11:00am.

Can anyone offer some placement help, or perhaps some ideas as to how I can get my visitors clicking on those ads without misleading them into doing it. Are three ads on the front page too many?

I have a google sitemap in operation and I rank quite highly in google for a lot of searches, such as "map of Freiburg", "restaurants freiburg", "attractions Freiburg" etc etc.

Any comments appreciated, thanks in advance.

 

Your site takes forever to load. For me anyways and I live just around the corner from you.

Other than that, it's probably hard to get ads that fit the site's theme. Currently, I'm seeing ads for pubs in Mallorca, Hotels in Munich and for German movies on VHS.

Nonetheless I like your site. It brings back some nice memories. I lived and worked in Freiburg (LiWei) for several years. BTW: What happened to the Irish Pub im Kornhaus? I couldn't find it in your pubs-section. It was my "living-room" back then and I drank many a pint there.

 

Thanks for your answer dandy11 - The pub in the Kornhaus is not so popular as it used to be when it was O"Dwyers, it's called the Dubliner now and it has lost some charm.

Anyway, as for the site loading speed, it's not normally that bad but I had also noticed it being a tad slow this morning, then I noticed several robots crawling all at the same time. I guess that's what hit it. Maybe I turn on the cache mechanism and see what that does to loading speed.

 

the site has good potential to perform well on adsense but it need some change

1
from my experience, dark ads are performing less

for example your right side is black, and very difficult to read the ads , if you change the color most probably you will see a big difference in ctr, personally i advice you bright color like white or so.

so you can change all layout right column to a bright color


2
the website is slow !! consider to move to a fast hoster, when i change my website from hosting to a dedicated server i saw a big improovement on adsense.

people like fast website, just like ferrari cars !

3
consider to put another ad on the main content of the website, like a 336x280 on white background


and of course test with channels different colors scheme to find out what is giving you more clicks !

all the best

fabio

 

Thanks Fabio,

Comments much appreciated.

So, I have changed the right column now to a much lighter blue colour scheme that I also use in the main logo, changing the ads too, although I am not sure if #0000FF standard blue is too blue for the links on the adsense stuff.

I have also used the large rectangle in the articles themselves and also the #0000FF blue as link colour.

As for the site speed, I have tested it a lot over lunch and I get between 0.3 seconds page loading time to 4 seconds a page, so it really seems that server load is the issue, rather than my cacheing and gzipping techniques. I have put a load time tester on the bottom of the page for a few days just to monitor it.

I am still not sure whether to keep the half-banner google ad on the front page between the 'cathedral' and the map of Germany. Not sure if it stands out enough to even get noticed.

Thanks again for you comments and taking the time to check out the page,
Dave

 

ad placements are not good ,i would put text ad instead of that banner ad on the top with white background.

 

ok i'm sure you will do the needed adjustment and tests to increase your ctr, here is a screenshot of what i will do to optimize the site

the optimization take in consideration the experience i have since 2 years of tests

the screenshot is limited to 58 kb but you see the idea

another thing to increase ctr could be moving the link unit to an horizontal one in the main content area

good luck

fabio

 

Thanks again Fabio, I have made more modifications as you suggested above. Over the weekend I will play with positioning of Link Ads to see if I can get a nice placement. Relevance of ads is not that good at the moment so hopefully in time the ads and link ads will focus on the word Freiburg a bit more.

Cheers again, Dave

 

yea now that screenshots looks better

 

I would shrink the main body width just a tad it will make the site look like it has more content. The rest looks great.

 

Good design and ad placement

 

I just caught your site and missed the orginal version. It looks good and your adsense placement and ad format seem to fit perfectly. Also the relevancy of your ads (Germamy tourism and hotels) is as good as it gets.

What would I suggest changing? Nothing. Don't be tempted to muck up your site with more or bigger ads. The ads that appear now are the highest paying ads Goggle has in its inventory. To create larger/mode ad units would simply display lower paying ads.

If your revenue is lower than you would like, work on promoting your site for more traffic. Even a low CTR will pay well with lots of the right kind of traffic.

 

Thanks for the advice, kinda makes sense now I think about it. Got a few more clicks yesterday after making the modifications, so thats better than one or none.

 

Sorry to dredge this post back from the past but i guess it's nicer than starting a new one... anyhoo...

I have tweaked a lot of stuff and wonder if someone could give me some more hints as to whether the placement is OK or some hints at what they would change.

I have tried to speed up the database considerably and I am pretty certain that the site loads a lot faster than it did before.

Fonts have changed throughout, layout made narrower as suggested previously, menu system revamped etc etc.

Any feedback would be great.
TIA, Dave