Increase Your Ads Click through ctr

Before getting strictly to technicalities related to ads customization — ads placement, color and unit style and the optimal amount of links on a page, let us quickly remind you that improvement of your site to increase CTR begins from content .

How to Write to Improve Your Ads CTR

There are two aspects here:

The first is related to generating targeted traffic and maintaining visitors on-site , enticing them to navigate through, by a functional site with a simple, uncluttered design.

The second has more to do with your marketing abilities, it's the widely debated pre-selling. Pre-selling means not only capturing the reader's attention, but developing needs, putting him into a buying mood. With AdSense™, you should concentrate more on the advertiser than on the reader.

The art of the copywriter consists in putting in just enough information to attract traffic, but not enough to satisfy the reader. Also, on how you build this content depends whether the reader will feel the need to read further. It takes a little skill acquired with practice to make this happen.

A good tip is to customize a little your content after you see what ads will appear on your page. Do a little content embroidery so as to introduce the ads and create the need to read them.

As you aim to pre-sell, you can successfully apply some manipulative techniques that are used in the sales businesses to persuade the buyer. Best suited here are the three components of persuasion in Aristotle's “Rethoric” — ethos, logos, pathos:

• ethos — stands for credibility.
  First step: draw and keep attention.
  How to do it: You must gain the statute of trusted source for your reader. The first condition is to have a solid, highly useful, reliable content.
• logos — appeals to the logical reasoning.
  Second step: convince.
  How to do it: Use arguments and evidence to sustain your point of view and recommendations.
• pathos — is the emotional appeal, the impulse that puts your reader in motion.
  Third step: make your reader get to action.
  How to do it: Use strong images and examples that would involve your reader emotionally.

Now, keep in mind: what you are about to read further is not an universal recipe. And DO try these at home (or better on your site)! Experimenting is essential. Results always vary from one site to another. And do combine methods.

Ads Customization

Ad Placement

• There is the theory, based on visitors' behaviour analysis, according to which some places of a page are more “visible” than others, as shown in Google's “heat map”.
• Add to this your own experience: open your page and see whatever catches your eye first. Place an ad there.

Ad Color

Opinions differ, because sites are not all alike.

Stand out colors

For some, a contrast coloring might work better than ads resembling the rest of the page.

Blend in colors

Others have noticed that they obtain better results with mimicking ads, as thus they appear to the reader additional content of the page.

Ad Unit Style

You can diversify your ads' look according to their placement on page. Thus:

• leaderboard and banner units are for page headers and footers
• skyscrapers can be placed anywhere in the page. Skyscrapers seem to stand out better, as they are less vulnerable to ad blindness than the horizontal ads.
• squares, rectangles, buttons are best placed inside a content area.

Ads Filtering

Use the URL filter feature to block boring, repetitive ads.

You may try blocking some ads to obtain variety in case you have recurrent visitors. But this can be tricky, as you might lose some good paying ads.

Ads Relevance

...is important in obtaining a high CTR. The more topic-related an ad, the greater the chance to be clicked. You can optimize your content to obtain more targeted ads.

Performance Tracking

Tracking the performance of each of your AdSense™ pages will help you increase the overall CTR.

A fast and easy way to do this is by removing your AdSense™ code from the pages that you track as performing weakly. Thus, logically, your CTR increases.

And you can do this by using AdSense™ channels or various trackers.

Moreover, the increase in CTR might be due not only to ratio calculation results (which will be automatically better), but it might happen that visitors will not be bored so much with ads page after page and thus will be more receptive and open at clicking.

Even if this does not happen and the increase in CTR does not coincide with an increase in revenue, a higher CTR is beneficial, as it seems it will attract higher value ads. Apparently Google takes into account this criterion when serving ads.

Links Number

Maintain a reduced number of links on each page. Don't give too many options to the visitor to leave a page, so as the probability for the user to click on a page will be bigger.

Pictures

Experience shows that placing page graphics and pictures next to your ads, will have beneficent results. Be sure not to place too many pictures though, as attention will be thus dispersed. One picture is optimum. People's attention is naturally drawn to faces, so it would better be a picture of a face. Also, a visitor will relate better to a real person than to a model.