8 months in, haven't earned a check!

[MisterTut]

I've been tinkering, adapting and optimising, and my revenue has improved, but as it is I think I'll only cover hosting and get one check by year's end!
Please critique my site at:

http://www.health-hack.com/

I'll consider anything. I'm pulling my hair out. :eek:

My best performing unit is on any given post's permalink page, between the article and the comments. I have a 2 ad text banner there.

Thanks in advance,

-Kevin

[ensode]

Kevin,

I would move the ads higher on the page. At least on my laptop, they are below the fold, that is, I had to scroll down to see them.

When I looked at your page, my eyes were naturally drawn to the rounded-corner orange boxes, I think placing ads close to those boxes would be a good strategy. I think a very good place to place one would be right under the wide orange round-cornered box at the top of the page, just above the main page content.

Hope that helps.
Ensode

[MisterTut]

Thanks. I just made the yellow "bubble" above the ads shorter and tightened up the spacing to bring the first ad further above the fold.

Any other thoughts?

[giftsolution]

How about including one ad block in a yellow bubble? (would that be allowed?)

As Ensode mentioned, my eyes keep going to your yellow bubbles at the top of the page.

[MisterTut]

I've tried that. It won't fit properly. I think it might be allowed IF there was some content in there, too, but if it's just the ads, I'm sure that's verboten.

[discuss]

I couldn't even locate the Adsense ads without searching. Use the yellow around the ads, or move the ads within the text. (Wrap around). Furthermore, if you haven't even received one check you need to look at getting more traffic, find some keywords and go on a linking campaign.

[MisterTut]

OK, I worked on the coding, and managed to squeeze an ad unit into the yellow bubble. If this works out, I may ditch the TargetFirst ads and put a skyscraper of Google ads in the yellow.
I think that my revenue stats will be negatively skewed for a while due to the hurricane relief PSA banner I put in last night. Had to do it, though- everyone's gotta give what they can...

Discuss, yup building the uniques is an ongoing task.

-Kevin

[Luke]

Hi Kevin, You have lots of room going down the right hand side of your website, why not Integrate some Adsense there?

As for the yellow banner, how is that going for you? I don't think many people would click it thats all, seems kind of too hidden.

Let me know what you think...

[golden14]

Whilst you've got some potentially good paying keywords on the site, the ads that are being pulled up aren't so relevant e.g. when I went into the first page most ads were for weight loss, but your subject matter wasn't on this topic. I'd suggest a few more of your keywords sprinkled liberally (but not too much) might well help target the ads better. Give it a try and see if the ads become more targetted.

[MisterTut]

Luke: I'd like to try that. I want to figure out if I can do a split test where half the readers see a skyscraper on the left, half on the right, then compare. so far, the ad in the bubble has been good, but that may just be that it's drawing reader's eyes because it's new. We'll see.

Golden 14: Well, most readers don't enter by the index page, most enter from the SE's either directly to a post page, or to one of the category pages where the ads are more targeted. On the index page, the ads are usually targeted to the newest post as of two-to-three days prior. That would be the drawback to using a blog format when you are not laser-targeted to a few keywords. :P

[djcoffman]

Here's what I would do if I were you...

Get rid of the Adlinks-- and all other google ads on your page. Drop in the header bar ad right under your menu where the adlinks are now.... make it a white background, with the type of blue letteriing to match your content there.... do that on every page.

Also, get rid of the THINK GEEK rotating banner up in the top left corner. that would be a much better spot for that stand alone googlead you're using in the lower right in the yellow bubble.

Don't test by the day, test by the week-- make a change, and let it sit for 5-7 days and see what's working and what's not. Right now, it seems like your site has too much to look at, which it all looks nice, but it's SO rich in content, that you might as well have the big ad bar front and center there for people to see.

Do the header thing-- and also use those new tags to target into key places on your page that you want google to feed ads from the keyword--- Joel has those linked in another thread...

I can almost guarantee you'd see a money difference.

[MisterTut]

DJCoffman- Good suggestions. I will integrate them, but over time, since you recommend testing changes for a week or so. When you say "Drop in the header bar ad right under your menu where the adlinks are now", I assume you are talking about a text leaderboard, yes?

BTW, love your comic!

[djcoffman]

DJCoffman- Good suggestions. I will integrate them, but over time, since you recommend testing changes for a week or so. When you say "Drop in the header bar ad right under your menu where the adlinks are now", I assume you are talking about a text leaderboard, yes?

BTW, love your comic!

Thanks man!

[golden14]

Mistertut,
Point taken! It's just the keyword density looked small, I had this problem with some of my sites early on, as soon as I increased the keyword density, the ads become much more focussed on my content rather than displaying ads for 'knitting machines' as I had in one instance!

[MisterTut]

Four days ago, I started making the following changes suggested here:

1. lost the blinking affiliate ad in the top left and put in a single text ad
2. Moved the adsense single ad in the right column up into the yellow bubble
3. made general improvements to site appearance

net effect on revenues, averaged over last 4 days: +63% :D

next set of changes to be tested:

1. Losing the adwords
2. Putting a text leaderboard under my nav bar
3. ditching either the single ad in the yellow bubble, or the 2 ad mini-banner between the posts and comments on permalink pages ('cause we're only allowed 3 ad units per page, plus one adwords unit).

I'll start these tests on Monday, I hope. :cool:

[MisterTut]

Welcome back!

After a week the 63% increase has stabilized to a 13% increase, as the novelty factor of my changes has worn off. Now I am testing, as promised, more changes recommended by all of you.

I removed the Ad Words below the Nav Bar
I removed the ad inside the yellow bubble (Right column)
I added a text Leaderboard

My new question to all of you is this:
Should the Leaderboard be A) Above the Logo, B) Where it is, or C) Below the long horizontal yellow rectangle?

Looking forward to your opinions!

-Kevin

[PS. That URL again- http://www.health-hack.com/]

[MisterTut]

As promised, I'm checking back in a week later with the results of the last test.

Findings: A further increase in revenue of 76% :D over the previous week (which, as you may recall from above was already a 13% increase from the week before that).

This is despite getting a really abysmal number of pageviews over this past weekend. :eek:

Current experiment: I've just added a yellow border around the leaderboard. In following weeks I may move the leaderboard up or down for more testing.

Please share any advice, thoughts or speculations.

Thanks,
-Kevin

[MisterTut]

Welcome back to another round of weekly documented experimentation, all done for your benefit (OK, I guess I'm getting something out of this, too :) )

Abysmal week. Horrible revenues. My impressions were, inexplicably, in the toilet this week. so, Very Few Visitors=Very Little Revenue.

I think that even so, the experiment seemed to be a failure, so that color combo is gone, now.

This week I'm trying a radical technique you may have never known about. I am specifying FOUR different color variations in one ad. This is not done with a php trick or a plugin, but is simply done in the ad builder by shift-selecting four different color schemes. Every time the page is reloaded, a different one of the four variants is displayed. Check it out for yourself at:

http://www.health-hack.com/

See you in a week!

[MisterTut]

My last set of tests were testing the concept of novelty. That was something of a success. My CTR went back to the high it had 2 weeks prior, but impressions went way down. I think that may have been because the site looked so durned ugly it was scaring people away.

So now it is set back to a simple color scheme, pale blue and grey text on a field of white with no border. This is what I was so successful with before. The difference this time is that I've dropped the unit lower, just beneath my tagline.

I also cleaned up my XHTML to validate, and optimised the size of my CSS file and my XHTML (as best I could). A faster load time may help retain viewers. I am looking next at further optimising my graphics (if practical).

Another experiment I ran:

in addition to Adsense, I have some TargetFirst ads. Though they look similar to Adsense, they are not contextual on the way adsense is. you pick a broad category, and they serve whatever ad inventory they have on that area. The targeting is kind of bronze-age in comparison to what google can do.

What I did was pair up each TargetFirst ad with an image, as many folks do with Adsense these days. Further, since they seem to always serve me with ads for Aikido, which has nothing to do, really, with anything I've ever written on, I wrote a story on it to try to capitalize on the ad.

Well, both tests seem to have been a success. I actually got click throughs on mmore TargetFirst ads this week than in any prior week.

The last thing I'm going to touch on is this: I've been keeping this post going to demonstrate the process of experimentation for the newer Adsense participants on this forum. Joel has been very kind to offer this space, and I don't want to abuse it by continually bumping this post if people aren't actually interested in my continuing it. If you are, please feel free to comment here, otherwise I'll let it lapse rather than continuing to post more test results.

Also, since I'm not a guru (Hey! look at the title of this thread!) I'm still interested in any feedback anyone may have on my site.

Thanks and best luck!

[MisterTut]

OK, before I close out this thread forever, I just wanted to share some great news with you all. For nine months I've been toiling over one content site that has a few hundred pages and after all this time does not even consistantly earn a dollar a day. The most it ever earned was just over 3 dollars in one day.

Since reading these forums and learning about adsense optimisation Things have turned around. This morning I awoke to find my other site (less than three weeks old, with less than ten pages of content) got indexed by MSN search engine last night and from that traffic ALONE I have already made over 6 dollars- and the day still has several hours to go!!

To say I am excited is an understatement! I thank Joel and all of you who gave criticism in this thread!!

[MisterTut]

Final post in this thread- and thankfully the title of this thread is no longer true. Yesterday I beat the magic $100.00 mark. :D The skills I've learned have put me on track for at least a check a month. My new profitable site has a CTR of an amazing 48% :eek: - even I don't quite believe that!

Lesson Learned: Good adsense implementation is important to revenues, but a narrow focus and picking great keywords is just as critical, if not more so. I thought I had picked a niche topic, but it was still too broad. Micro-niche is best, if you can find keywords that will support the needed traffic.

I was waiting to put up more sites until I made my first site profitable. Bad mistake, as that site may never become truly profitable. I didn't even realise how good my Adsense juju had become.

Best luck and goodbye (to this thread),