It’s time for another ad reshuffle. I think the old AdSense placements have been overused already and I feel some shuffling of ads around would push the CTRs even further.
Was trying to migrate the blog structure to use custom permalinks via mod_rewrite but it just messed up some of my custom hacks. I also installed a Permanent Redirect plugin which ensures the the old links redirect to the new custom URL. But alas, the move broke most of the structure and navigation of my blog that after 30 minutes of tweaking, I gave up and reverted back to the old setting.
The attempt was actually motivated by the apparent low ad quality (most of the ads were about blogs). I thought the transition would help in getting more relevant ads.
Anyway, I switch the ad block from the bottom of each post to the top of each post. This seems to be more click-friendly to visitors coming in from search engines. The look seems a little odd though, but I immediately found that ad results are more relevant to the content.
Will be checking for ad performance in the next week or two and see if this is really worth it.
AdSense computes and arranges ads that are shown so that clicks will get the highest return. Now, what you need to do is make the content more relevant (keyword density). :)