If you’ve subscribed to my blog, you would know that I have been conducting WordPress theme design tests. My goal was to find out which themes would generate better Adsense ClickThrough Rates (CTR). High Adsense CTR significantly contributes to Advertising income. Let me give you a summary of what has happened so far:

  1. I started out with a Water Wordpress Theme. This was my theme throughout last year up to January of this year. The theme was getting me a nice Adsense CTR and around $2-$5 daily. (Please note: I can’t share the exact CTR because Google’s Terms of Use indicates I shoudn’t do that).
  2. Then I tested an original theme with with background and 3-columns, fluid width format. Once I implemented this, the Adsense numbers both in terms of CTR and income went down. I initially thought that this might just be a fluke. After three weeks though, I found that the numbers were still very low.
  3. I then changed the colors of the theme to see if the low CTR and Adsense income was due to the color of the site. I used a theme with Maroon colors on the background and on the link text. It was still a three-column, fluid-width design. In two weeks of testing, the numbers were still comparatively low.
  4. Last week, I introduced the theme that was getting my a very high CTR rate on my other website. The CTR rate went back up.

Lessons so far:

  • It seems that, in terms of Adsense CTR statistics, a website with two-columns fares much better than that with three columns.
  • Images beside Adsense Ads still work (even thought this is not allowed). The workaround it to use images from Adsense Image Ads.
  • Changing the color of the Ad link from blue to maroon doesn’t seem to affect Ad performance.

I plan to test another three-column design with Adsense Ads that blend with the rest of the website to see if that will work. I’ll set it up as soon as I finish the new theme. I might just even play around with the Google Optimizer to have really accurate web site performance data.

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