It’s been a while since I changed any of the ads on HaloBoards.com and after checking out some adsense reports on the site I decided to make a few changes. The two ads that showed the worst performance are the ones I decided to change. The 160 x 600 skyscraper ad had an all time CTR of .04% while the 468 x 60 footer ad had an all time CTR of only .01%! Clearly those are terrible numbers and that space could be put to better use.

I replaced the 160 x 600 skyscraper ad with an Auction Ads skyscraper of the same size using the keywords: Halo 3;Xbox 360;Halo Books. I haven’t used Auction Ads that much, so that is another reason why I wanted to make a change in that location. The footer is in a poor location seperated from the content of the site; however, I don’t want to bring it up any higher on the page because I feel like there are already enough ads covering the upper parts of the page. In any case, while I was looking at my stats and deciding what to do with the space I decided to check out Google’s referral program. I was suprised to see a wide range of categories to select from with various CPA offers. After looking through all of the offers I settled on a few referrals in the games category. I don’t expect to get many referrals in the footer location, but I wanted to test the waters with Google’s referral program and see how it works out. The only other time I had used their program for is the Adsense and FireFox referrals that have been around for a long time.

I will find much better locations for Google Referrals on HaloBoards and my other sites later, but I was suprised to see all of the referral offers that Google has going on now. I will post back on the progress of these two changes later.

Have you tried any of the new referrals that Google is offering?