Changing The Color Of Google Ads

In my last entry I mentioned that I'm dropping Yahoo! Publishers Network ads from my main website. When going back to Google AdSense I've decided to also mix things up a bit by alternating the link text in the Google ads with 4 different colors to see if there's a noticeable difference in CTR.

Granted, I might not be able to tell after having been off of Google ads for a week, but I figured I'd give it a try.

One concern is a recent forum posting at WebmasterWorld where users of AdSense have said that their revenue has shown a sharp decline in October.

Well, the month I dreaded finally came - the month when the AdSense empire would crumble. OK, "empire" is just a joke, but hey, it was paying my bills and letting me enjoy some leisure time with the wife and all my kids (20 dogs). Alas, all good things must come to an end, and end they have in "Black October." Like a faucet being turned off, my AS income dried up. Interestingly, traffic did not dry up. Just a big drop in CTR and EPC. I think about all those long long days and hours in front of this slave box (er, computer) writing articles and getting links, and yeah, I'm pretty sad right about now. Not sure what I'll do, but I'm educated and can probably find a job that isn't too tedious. Hate the thought of going back into the rat race, but that's life.

I noticed a sharp decline in traffic to my site in mid-October after Google implemented a change in their indexing system. My traffic fell off by nearly 50%, but I have normal fluctuations in traffic. This of course affected revenue from advertising, so I can't really judge yet whether the same decline in revenue happened to me solely based off of clicks.

I'll have to wait and see after reimplementing the code.

This entry is in the following archive(s):
Google AdSense Archive