Getting off to a bad start

The first day of my trial of goal monitoring is over and my advertising income average has declined to $3.18. The target for the day is $3.28. That means I now have to bring in a 30 minute slot during the day in which I do nothing except work on improving the average.

I'm not counting writing blog entries as counting towards the 30 minutes. It has to be "behind the scenes" stuff.

Although starting off with a "failure" like this is a bit depressing, it will be interesting to see what I do as a result - at the moment I have plenty of possibilities but haven't made any decisions - and how quickly it is effective.

Comments

[Andrew Ward]

Mark - my first hint here would be to move your Adwords so that they're more visible. It took me a little hunting to actually find your Adwords just now!

[Mark Forster]

Thanks, Andrew. I hope they are a bit more visible now.
Mark

[Michael Randall]

Ads in the sidebar don't often do well. Without measuring, it looks like this main column is wide enough for a 468-wide banner. One of those either just above or just below the actual content (but before the comments) would probably do very well.

The Link units often do relatively badly, too, because you don't make anything until people click the ad unit, *then* click an ad on the page that follows - twice as much for users to do before you make anything.

Hope some of this helps...

[Mark Forster]

Thanks for the help, Michael. The problem is that Google only allows 3 boxes/banners of the same type of ad on one page. So if I am going to have three on the main part of the page, I have got to have a different type on the side-bar.

Another point is that Google feeds the best ads through to the first set of code it encounters on any page. As that would be the sidebar, I don't want the best (i.e. highest paying) ads on the sidebar where they get less attention.

I am continually experimenting with this.

[Michael Randall]

I'm only seeing the AdLinks unit in the sidebar - no AdSense units other than that. Something odd going on.

You're quite right about the order of the ads, though - I once added a tiny ad into the header of the page template, and because it took the best ads and wasn't very visible, the revenue actually dropped. Removed the extra ads, and it went back up again.

Ah! I've just seen what's happening with the other ads - they are appearing on the front page, but not on individual post pages. I subscribe by RSS, so I was never seeing the front page - always clicking through to specific posts.