Adsense and Gender
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I wrote a post on some observations I made about the Adsense clicking habits of females in my office a few weeks ago. Basically I noticed that the females I obeserved tend to click the ads on the search engines more than males. Ana Bryce picked up the post in her psychology of Adsense post and hypothesized that females may tend to do this and that she thought females may be more apt to click on ads at the end of an article where males may tend to click during the middle of the article or even before. Now none of this is meant to offend either sex as I could care who performs an Adsense click as long as they make one. I’m just trying to understand the triggers that may entice one group of people to perform a certain action over another group.
This was a very interesting observation and one I thought may have some merit, so as an internet marketer I decided to test out Ana’s theory. I have a couple of sites that do okay and attract a majority of female visitors, so I went ahead and set up channels for each location in the site. I should have done that before this test, but I was acting lazy and taking shortcuts again so I had only used the URL channel for both of these sites.
These sites are both on similar subjects actually the same subject and both pull in similar Adsense ads. Now this test has only been running a few days so I don’t have a clear picture yet, but thought I would report anyway. Really I just needed a topic for the blog and could not think of anything else at the moment. 
I won’t spill the beans as to exactly what the topic of the sites are but let’s just say they are in a lucrative health niche.
Both sites are relatively new less than a month old and they are both bringing in an average of 65 uniques a day. Both sites hold an average of about 13% CTR for the Adsense ads on the site. At this moment the sites are only monetized with Adsense, no other methods. There are external links besides Adsense on both the sites and both sites are built on the WordPress platform. One site averages a little higher than a 13% CTR, but it is also a little older ( about a week and a half) and it has about 15% more posts than the second site. As a result it also has a better placement in the web, but the second site out ranks it for several key search terms.
I set up the Adsense as such. On both sites the Adsense placement is the same. The only difference is the colors of the Adsense Ads complement the link colors on the sites and all the backgrounds are white.
I use three different sizes of ads. In the In the top left navigation area there is a 160X600 tower with the same on the right side except lower on the page below the fold. There is also a 468X60 Banner in the Adhesive plugin as the first post in both sites. I originally played around with the 336×280 Rectangle on one of the sites in the sticky position as everyone suggests as the best format but the other site’s ad placement with the same ad position out performed it more than three to one in number of clicks versus impressions.
The third ad type was the 336X280 and it is placed after every post where I can without breaking Google’s TOS on number of ads. On all the longer posts I put this Ad at the end of my posts. These ads show between the end of the article and the comments. I have quite a few comments as these are pretty chatty readers, but I have absolutely no Adsense clicks on that ad code at all. On one site the most of the clicks occur in the Top left 160X600 and the other one most clicks occur in the right 160X600. The sticky post is about equal between the two sites with approximately 25% of the clicks occurring there.
I have not ran these tests long enough to draw a conclusion one way or the other as of yet, so I’m not sure what any of these preliminary numbers mean at all, if anything. I’m getting pretty good CTR so I’m going to leave it alone and report back more on this later. As I stated earlier I don’t want to offend any one and I hope no one takes offense at these observations. I’m very interested in understanding why one group of people may react a certain way to certain stimuli and react to that stimuli in a method that may earn more revenue and improve my CTR. Everyone who has Adsense on their sites should be looking at the same things. The better you understand your visitor’s actions, the better experience you can build for them and the more revenue you can put in your pocket. The only way you are going to know this is to test Ad placement and analyze the results of those tests to draw your own conclusions.
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