Do More Ads Equal Less Revenue? Does Click Through Rate Factor Into Revenue?

Last week I mentioned that I had received a BlogAd on my left navbar and had decided to use the opportunity to remove my left navbar AdSense spot and add a 336x280 AdSense spot below my content to see how it did.

Well since then the BlogAd has expired and I have decided to add the left navbar AdSense spot back in and leave the 336x280 spot in place to see what happens.

What I expect to happen is that the value of the clicks will decline and so will the revenue. I suspect that your Click Through Rate (CTR) on a spot has a lot to do with what you get paid. I noticed that when I removed a mid-level 468x60 ad -- that I used to run between the content and the comments and that was performing poorly compared to the other spots -- that my overall eCPM (Earning per thousand pages) went up.

With 3 ads on the page your CTR on each ad will decline since if they click on one ad unit the other two units do not have a chance to get clicked and it's counted against their CTR. You would figure that with more ads on the page you have a better chance of one ad being clicked on. If however your CTR is factored into what you get paid per click then having more ads is actually detrimental to your overall revenue per click.

I'll leave it up for a couple days and report back.

This entry is in the following archive(s):
Analysis Of Changes Archive

Google AdSense Video Ads?
Increasing Your Revenue Through Geo Targeted Ads