Some tips to increase Adsense CTR (click through ratio)

Well, I already posted a tip on how to increase your CPC on Adsense (cost per click), but CPC doesn't help worth a crap if you have no clicks or are getting a 0.5 percent CTR. Who cares if you make 1.50 a click if you can't get a click?! Getting a decent number of clicks through is just as important as getting clicks that pay the bills, and if your ad placement sucks or you have not enough (or too many) ads, or ads that are too invisible/blend in, you're screwed on your CTR.

NOTE: None of these tips apply to HubPages, because you can't control where the ads pop up here. Hubpages places all the ads for you, and IMO, they do a fairly decent job. Just make sure to use enough different capsules, so as to allow ads to pop up in between the capsules.

Anyways, these tips will help improve your Adsense CTR on your own websites.

1: Place ad units side by side. This is a good way to break up the monotony a bit. As most internet-marketer types know, Chitika has these new "mega-units" that are 550x250, and similar such sizes. Adsense has nothing of the sort. Chitika users have reported large increases in CTR just by employing this ad-unit. In Adsense, the biggest you get are 336x280 and 300x250. However, placing one 300x250 and one 250x250 side by side gives you, in effect, a combined 550x250 ad unit, without being too obtrusive.

The ad imbalance (4 ads next to 3 ads) of this unit combo also reduces the incidence of ad blindness, on your readers' parts. You can also do two 250x250s side by side for a balance, or two 300x250s or even two 336x280s side by side if you have a lot of free real-estate that you can give up, but my personal favorite is the combined 550x250.

2: Blend your ads. Try not to have borders. Make the link color on your ads, the same color as the link color of your regular links. Make the text the same, etc. If your ads contrast with the rest of your site, ad-blindness sets in very easily. However, blending ads is a better way to prevent ad-blindness. It may sound contradictory, but the reason blending ads is better is, if your ads are a different color, repeat viewers will know exactly where not to look when they come back to your site. The better your ads blend in, the more likely they are to be read as if they were just a normal part of the site.

3: Use the hot spots. What ads get the most clicks? The ones that are higher, and more to the left. Ads on the right side of the page will get you jack squat for clicks. Ads on the left side will get more clicks, unless you are doing a page in a language that's read from right to left. And why will ads at the top get clicked more often? Simple: More people will see them. I stopped placing ad units anywhere BUT the top of the page, right below the title of the site (because if the ad is above the title, it fades into pure invisibility).

4: Use the link units. The best places to put these, are in between posts, in the middle of posts, or in your main menu area of the site - anywhere that you might have links, or that they might steal someone's attention. They take nothing away from the ad-units (as long as you don't put them in an area where they compete for attention with ad-units).

5: Use ad unit types that will get attention. This is mainly taken care of in tip 1, as I believe that the side-by-sides will get the MOST attention, but otherwise, use the ad units that are proven to get clicked the most - 336x280, 300x250, and 250x250. If you have to, use 160x600 on the sidebar of your page, but while it's proven to work, I believe it to be rather unnecessary, and it's never worked as well as the square and rectangles have for me. I have higher CTRs across the board now than I ever did when I used the ad towers.

One tip that would increase CTR, but that I don't recommend, is to change your ad units to "text only". They will increase your CTR, because the image ads, which usually run on a cost-per-thousand-views basis, will not run, but while they will increase your CTR, they will drop your CPC (cost per click). As far as I'm concerned, the text-only option is worthless, and makes me less money. So I have all of my ad units run both text and image ads.

Good luck, and happy Adsensing!