Minor Changes Significant Results: Analyzing Recent Changes On Diggers Realm And Their Impact On Revenue

Minor tweaks and changes to your layout and website can show improved results. Over the past few days I have implemented a few minor changes on Diggers Realm

Diggers Realm after changes

1. The BlogAd in the Premium Left spot has expired and therefore the Google AdSense on my left navbar has floated to the top giving it more exposure "above the fold".
2. I have modified the header slightly switching the navigation bar to the top, moving the AdSense ads beneath them and removing the border along the bottom of them.
3. I have enabled themed ads.
4. I have removed image ads from Google AdSense after seeing one too many "visual chat" ads that had nothing to do with my content and seemed to be running on a CPM (cost per thousand displays) rather than a PPC (Pay Per Click) model.

Diggers Realm prior to changes

Most of the changes took effect Friday December 16, 2005 around mid-day. By the Terms Of Service at Google I can't disclose my Click Through Rate (CTR), I can however disclose that my CTR has increased from 30-50% over what it was the past few days. With so many changes at once it's hard to target exactly how much impact each change has had, but removing a border from your ads is highly recommended by Google. While they didn't actually have a border on them, I had introduced my own form of border with the purple bar and having the ads contained in a "box".

Today's CTR is through the roof (over 300% increase), but that can mainly be attributed to a high influx of MSN search traffic due to a few entries showing up as the number 1 and 2 result on MSN. In general MSN search traffic (and AOL for that matter) is click happy and likes to click on ads. So I'm pretty sure it's due to that and nothing that I actually did myself. Revenue is nothing special though even with the higher CTR. I'm wondering if I have some CPM ads running on the site and I'm not being paid for the clicks. With CPM ads you get paid per thousand displays of the ad and not for clicks.

I think that Google is pretty good at showing what brings you the most revenue since they get a cut of it and it is in their interest to show the highest paying form of ad, but they can't foresee things like today's click happy traffic and adjust accordingly (for instance showing ads that are PPC so they are higher paying).

I'll continue to watch the results and report in as things change.

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

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