The results are in
The results of my little experiment are in, and by the fact that the ads are no longer up you can probably guess they aren’t good. Last week we had a grand total of 72 views of the ads, and a grand total of 2 clicks. That leads us to a grand income of $1.36. Wooo! Unfortunately you can’t even get a bottle of coke for that…
So what is the problem them? Well looking at what other peoples results it seems the average click through rate (CTR) is no more than about 2%, which for us was about right. Secondly placement of ads very much affects the CTR. We had them rather hidden down the side of the sidebar, which Adsense says is one of the worst places to put them. We probably could make more money by having placed them better, but I don’t really fancy this place looking like this. That site is absolutely horrible, and I expect they could actually make more money by reducing the number of ads.
Anyway, for now this is going to go back to (and remain) ad free, unless of course we get into lots of debt and need a quick way out but I highly doubt that is going to happen anytime soon.