I am helping a friend with a site that makes most of its money from adsense.

This site has one leaderboard ad, one skyscraper and in posts.

problem is, this site gets anywhere between 7000 and up to 40 000 uniques a day and the best we've seen from adsense is about $50 a day

the CTR is terrible (0.75%)

surely I can get this up? but how?

any advice is appreciated

Shoot me a pm with url and ill take a look.

hah, cant pm with less than 15 posts

where is the traffic coming from? social traffic and recurring visitors are less likely to click than search engine traffic. some things can't be changed, but your friend could try different monetization, like an ebook, list building, etc

Do you use google analytics? If so you can check the in-page clicks and see where users are clicking. Then adjust ads.

What theme does ur friend use?

I'd say 80% of the traffic is from stumble. 20% from search engines.

This particular blog would do really well in some food and baking niches
(she ranks higher than food dot com for certain food and baking keywords)

stumblers love her blog but the traffic is erratic, but it averages out at around 7000 a day

she is currently using a theme called copyblogger but im am changing that soon to a blue theme called heatsense.

when you say try different monetization like ebook and listbuilding, im not sure of these concepts, how could we monetize it using an ebook or lists?

ouchthathurts

yep, have got analytics running but im not sure what you would mean by addjust the ads?

Check out CTRTheme, its from a bhw member, I use it myself and I like the results!

Originally Posted by pocketaces

I'd say 80% of the traffic is from stumble. 20% from search engines.

This particular blog would do really well in some food and baking niches
(she ranks higher than food dot com for certain food and baking keywords)

stumblers love her blog but the traffic is erratic, but it averages out at around 7000 a day

she is currently using a theme called copyblogger but im am changing that soon to a blue theme called heatsense.

when you say try different monetization like ebook and listbuilding, im not sure of these concepts, how could we monetize it using an ebook or lists?

ouchthathurts

yep, have got analytics running but im not sure what you would mean by addjust the ads?

Stumble Upon traffic doenst convert. They are mostly teens looking to see cool things or funny things and then stumble again, not clic on ads.

Agree on stumble traffic, not that great. I would test placements once you switch the theme. Maybe change/test between text and image ads. I belivee for stumble traffic all image ads will convert better