How to increase your add click-throughs (CTR)

About a month ago, I added adsense to my blog. Roughly 1400 page views later (adsense says 941, but from what I can tell they estimate roughly 70% of actual hits) - I got my first ad click! And it's a big one too - worth 37 cents. Wow. I'm serious, I think that's a pretty good amount for a single click.

That got me to thinking, how to get more viewers to click on the ads in your blog.

Here's a good post on how one *generally* can make money blogging.

http://www.ezyblogger.com/

He describes 3 ways to do it. One is advertising, one is promoting your own product, and one is affiliate sales, where you make a commission on the sales of products you promote in your blog. Well, my products are Japanese learning software products, and those of you who happen across this blog are likely to be mobile developers, so that kind of rules out the Japanese. I could do something like make tutorial about Android or iPhone, but there are millions of those already, plus those take actual work, as opposed to just writing along as I program. I could blog about Japanese, but that's about 4th on my list of priorities right now, which means I won't get to it. I could try to make affiliate sales for phones, but this isn't a mobile phone blog. It's a mobile phone programming blog, and I don't have any plans to change that.

So, we're back to ads, and how to get those busy viewers to click on them. I know I don't personally click on ads very often. I really don't even look at them. But somebody out there must.

Let's google some more....according to this thread,

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/AdSense/thread?tid=0639f890f9edcd50&hl=en

you're supposed to get 1-3 clicks per 100 page views - something I'm not even close to, not even in the ballpark. Well, again I could work at the format, and test the ads and see which ones seem to get the most response - but that's tough to do if you have a sample size of 1 click.

Here's a recent post which addresses this issue:

http://www.adsensehowtos.com/learn/increase-your-ads-ctr.html

I guess click-through-rate is called CTR. Ok, I'm really getting with the lingo here. He suggests two methods.

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.

I don't see how a site could be less cluttered than mine and still include ads - It's text, the ads on the right, and one at the bottom of the blog. I think I read somewhere that the ad should be *in the middle* of the blog, but I don't know if blogger allows for that.

To continue:

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.

Ah, I see. This is to get them to get curious about the ads, by what they read in the blog. Hmm.

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.

Ok. I see. Let' take a look at my most recent blog. Do they have the same ads every time? I would've thought they rotated. Ok, there is an ad for Mutual Mobile, which looks to be a company which provides mobile solutions for organization. It actually looks to be rather a cool company. They've done work for Google, Xerox, Audi, BBA, and presumably a host of others. Very nice web site. I ought to check out these ads more, they're actually pretty interesting.

Hmm..I wonder if my ad click was registered? Well, I'm logged in under my regular, blog-connected email, so maybe not. But, what if I do it from say, my wife's computer? That way there won't be any cookies or some tricky way of tracking the system. I'll only do it once. Lord knows I don't want to get kicked off of Adsense, with all that revenue flow.

Ok, I clicked on an X-Code training ad. Lets see if it shows up under my "Monetize" tab on blogger. No, and neither does the page impressions count, which is frozen on 941. We'll check both these numbers tomorrow. Blogger tells you how many impressions you have every day, so, we'll compare it. It also shows another statistic, CTR%, click through rate. Mine is .11, which doesn't exactly jibe completely with the click count (1) and the number of views (941). Shouldn't it be .094? Either way, it's around 1/10 of one percent, hardly the 1-3 percent supposedly done.

What would be really interesting is if anyone who clicked an ad either emailed me, or just made a comment - just saying "ad clicked" or something. Then, I could measure the accuracy of adsense's statistics. Btw, if you do happen to click through to an ad - please take it seriously! These are our sponsors, after all.