AdSense Position Counts
There is a strong indication from the performance of my site, Web PickUps, that the position on the page of the ad block does have a significant effect on the number of clicks you will see. This is a confirmation of information that I have found on the web. What works for others seems to be working for me with this site.
Web PickUps is a viral email archive site. It has been amazing to me to see how many of these emails are searched for by subject. Since I started using the WordPress blogging software and the email subject line as a post title I have seen increasing traffic to the site. When I set up WordPress I followed the general thinking that I had gleaned from my research on the best ad location for this type of site. This site I have always expected to produce little in the way of ad revenue. That has been the case since I put up the site. Now the click rate has improved enough that my overall click rate including junk pages is nearly double my historic rate. And this is from a site where the visitors are not even shopping, they are looking for humor.
I have two other sites that get steady daily traffic. I will be moving the ad blocks on at least one of those sites soon to see if the change makes a difference there. If the test proves successful I will move the position on the other site.
The ad block and position that are working on this site is a large rectangle located between the post title and post content on post pages. There is one other recommendation that I should implement here. I have a second ad block on the post pages in the right column. The recommendation is to only have one ad block and perhaps a link unit on a page. The theory is that the more ad blocks the lower the mean price of the ads presented will be. Google serves the higher priced ads first and then fills in with decending value ads. The more ad units on the page the more opportunities for a visitor to click on a lower value ad.
At first I thought that there was a direct correlation between visitors that arrived by search and click rate. It appears that the ad positioning is the defining factor. Those arriving by search for a subject line are sent to a post page rather than the front page of the blog. The front page has only the right column ad block. I should redo the ads using channel identifiers to determine which ad position is actually doing the job.
Of course, without traffic there are no clicks. My main objective must be to build traffic, but my recent experience shows that optimizing the monetization scheme can significantly improve the results.