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Review effectiveness of ads
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Description

It's about time we had another look at our ads. Obviously, ads are essential for keeping ShoutWiki alive, and we're not going to be doing out right with them although it is worth noting they are somewhat intrusive and don't do many things for the viewing experience.

We've got a number of different ad units running across various skins. We should have a look at how each is performing, and how the performance varies from skin to skin.

If any unit is performing poorly, we should consider removing it and reducing the ads on a page. We should also look at the ads that do well and consider if repositioning them or replacing them with different sized units would be less intrusive and/or have a greater earning potential.

My main target of this review is going to be the button and square ads which are text-only and normally live near navigation links and seem a little evil (and maybe against Google policy), but also have the lowest earning potential of the units Google offers (citation needed.)

Event Timeline

So with the help of the AdSense app, I used my only university tutorial session of the week to establish that the 200x200px ad unit is to be removed as it serves no purpose.

Full methodology/results for that decision will follow shortly.

One thing that I noticed today was that it's very hard to track the effectiveness of the high performing units. I'd like to know what skins, what display types and what languages are making us money in the big units. That way we can slim down on pointless ads or reconsider placements etc for various skins.