Please review first effort using adsense

[pulpfriction]

Hi all, would welcome any feedback, good bad or ugly, on the placement and frequency of ads on www.golf.com.au. It's our first play with Adsense.

Thanks in advance.
W

[petesatrain]

Hi all, would welcome any feedback, good bad or ugly, on the placement and frequency of ads on www.golf.com.au. It's our first play with Adsense.

Thanks in advance.
W
pulpfriction,

I have one word... WOW! :D There isn't anything I can find wrong with the site. It looks awesome. All I can say is get loads of traffic, as golf is such a competitive niche.
Great work!

[pulpfriction]

Thanks for that. Correct the million dollar problem is always going to be traffic..:-)

[Reprobate]

Hi all, would welcome any feedback, good bad or ugly, on the placement and frequency of ads on www.golf.com.au. It's our first play with Adsense.

Thanks in advance.
W
Geez mate ya done well scoring the "golf" as a .com.au :D

If I were you I'd insert an Ad Unit or a Link Unit in after about three of the news articles in the middle column.

And I'd move that "Geoff Ogilvy" banner down to just after the sixth news article.

Whereabouts in Australia are you?

[Sohan]

Took me about 10 seconds to notice the ads lol :P

[pulpfriction]

is that good or bad ?

[pulpfriction]

Hi, in sunny Melbourne here. I'll take your ideas for a test drive today and see how things go.
Thanks for the feedback.
Regards
W


Geez mate ya done well scoring the "golf" as a .com.au :D

If I were you I'd insert an Ad Unit or a Link Unit in after about three of the news articles in the middle column.

And I'd move that "Geoff Ogilvy" banner down to just after the sixth news article.

Whereabouts in Australia are you?

[TheRealLifeGuy]

uh... noticed that your "golf equipment" pages are nothing but an ad block. Is that done purposefully? seems to me like you had better add some content to those pages...

[drenlow]

Great site! Really good job for first time adsense implementation.

One thing I would do to help increase your revenue would be to put a leaderboard banner across the top right underneath "Australia's #1 Golf Website".

That should help increase the clicks.

Hope this helps!

Dan

[pulpfriction]

uh... noticed that your "golf equipment" pages are nothing but an ad block. Is that done purposefully? seems to me like you had better add some content to those pages...

Thanks, thought I had done that...never enough hours in a day :-)

[pulpfriction]

uh... noticed that your "golf equipment" pages are nothing but an ad block. Is that done purposefully? seems to me like you had better add some content to those pages...


Is having no 'real' content in breach of Googles rules ?

[ricklomas]

Hi, nice pretty site.....the lack of content isn't going to help the traffic situation...so build some nice original content, don't just rely on RSS.

I have however noticed that the home page fails validation very badly with 61 errors, this won't help either..it's worth spending a day or so fixing it.
More details with this link http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.golf.com.au%2F

[pulpfriction]

Hi, nice pretty site.....the lack of content isn't going to help the traffic situation...so build some nice original content, don't just rely on RSS.

I have however noticed that the home page fails validation very badly with 61 errors, this won't help either..it's worth spending a day or so fixing it.
More details with this link http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.golf.com.au%2F

Hi 'ricklomas', thanks for the feedback. Most the errors being reported belong to third party urls, so nothing we can do about that. Alot of other others refer to missing ALT tags in a spacer image we use.
Regards
w

[ricklomas]

Ahhh, I have had simlar problems myself with feeds....
For example http://www.ricklomas.com/nokia/nokia-n93.php has loads of errors, what I try and do is keep the high traffic pages valid such as http://www.ricklomas.com/remove-drm-from-wmv.htm and the home page too.
good luck anway!
Rick
www.ricklomas.com

[sgsmorgan]

Hi all, would welcome any feedback, good bad or ugly, on the placement and frequency of ads on www.golf.com.au. It's our first play with Adsense.

Thanks in advance.
W


First of all, if this is your first attempt at an Adsense site then the rest of the world look out- seriously, you have put together a good site so well done.

If I may throw my small 2p in I would suggest you take a look a the following:

1. Try and bring the majority of your ad blocks into the above the fold area of the page. More people will see them and it will increase your CTR immensely.

2. Take your Menu Bar from the left and move it over to the right and then investigate the possibility of integrating one of the larger Ad Blocks - ideally the 336 x 280 large rectangle. Alter your text so that there is an amount of wrap around so it looks as if the Ad Block sits into the page with the text surrounding it. This movement would have the additional benefit of moving the ad block into the traditional major "heat spot" in the page with the high paying keyword ads coming in first.

3. Check out how much support there is for your chosen keywords and check your ad placements. By this I mean that if there isn't much support for decent return after ad placement 5 or so then cut down the number of ads accordingly because otherwise the cheaper ads coming at the bottom of your second Skyscraper are going to crucify your nett yields by making sure that the price per click is abnormally too low. It might be that you get a better ROI by having several 120 x 240 Vertical banner serving 6 Ads in three places. This may give you a better return. If you want a more detailed explanation of this then PM me and I will give you some more info on this but at the moment you are running 10 adverts within the two skyscrapers and I would bet that this is cutting your potential yield accordingly.

Hope this helps

Steve Morgan

[pulpfriction]

Hi Steve, thanks for the excellent feedback. Some great ideas in there. We never stop learning do we?

I'll revisit a few of my ideas, have a play with the site and see where I end up.

Thanks again. Much appreciated.

Regards
Warren