Change of Tactics

84,000 unique visitors

$70 AdSense

Traffic has settled down to roughly 1,300 uniques/day.

It doesn't take a genius to see that my Click-Through-Rate is extremely low.

I have to give the thumbs down to AdSense, at least if you're serving a tech-savy crowd. For one, Nerds all browse with AdBlock or something similar enabled (heck, I've got to admit, so do I.) Secondly, I had a ton of trouble getting it to serve up proper Ad content because you cannot 'ban' certain keywords from the Ads you'll get. For example, I'd keep getting ads for 'transvestite boots' and stuff like that, and the only way to prevent that content was to painstakingly ban each domain 1 by 1. My list is pretty big right now. I can understand why Google runs it this way, but it's a significant flaw of that model.

Instead I've discovered what appears to be a service right up my alley. It's called Commission Junction and it basically links you with stores, where you can advertise that stores' products right on your site, with nice clean photos and not too much text (Amazon has a similar service, but not available in CAD). If a surfer on your site clicks on the Ad, and goes on to buy something, you get a certain percentage of the sale. They have a number of advertising companies that fit perfectly with the Fashion4Nerds cause (that is, they're well known (Gap, Shoes.com) and they have free shipping type deals and more importantly free return shipping if you don't like the product or it doesn't fit. This is key I think - I would never order clothes online otherwise.

This may be the way of the future. I've woven the 'ads' fully into the content of the site. In fact, if you're surfing with an AdBlocker, the site won't make much sense - there will be no images on it at all! This could be the way to go... but I've kept some AdSense banners just in case.

To start I've changed over the shoes section to the new format. I'll run it for a day or two, and see if I can make any sales. If it does, I'll re-jigg the whole site. Regardless, I'll let you guys know how it works out...