vangogh, I unfortunately may have spoken too soon about the google ads not taking anything away from regular software sales.

The last two weeks of the month are normally the most profitable for me, especially for PC iMail... but it's not panning out that way this month. I must have just been lucky earlier this month.

I suspect the google ads are getting in the way of the message that my landing page is trying to convey, so I've yanked them today to see if I can pull some conversions these last few days of March.

Sigh... another lesson learned the hard way (but I tend to remember those the best).

I'm still keeping the google ads on other pages, which are mainly focused on free downloads that don't make me any money.

Hard to know for certain if the ads are costing sales. You'd probably need to test over a longer period of time to really know.

On the positive side even if you may have lost some money this month you're learning what does and doesn't work. Imagine if you didn't know and placed ads alongside products for sale on another site. Maybe on that site you would have made some money from the ads not realizing how much you might be losing in sales. Now you'll know.

I have a gaming community website that generates about $2.00 per day average. It's not a get-rich-quick type idea. I've had the site for about 4 years.

You might be having the problem of too many tech savvy visitors. Tech savvy people are able to distinguish the ads very quickly and develop ad blindness so CTR tends to be lower on tech sites.

Well, Vangogh, I know this question won't fit in here. But, I'm just curious. I recently had a talk with a friend. He writes PHP scripts and softwares for Windows and Linux.

He usually gets around $200 as profit every month. But, one day, he decided to turn some of his scripts into Open Source and got GPL license. He told me that his Adsense clicks increased the moment he done that.

The money he got from those scripts which were shareware were nearly $20 per month while now, he gets $100 per month from adsense. Is this true ? I mean, does pages based on Open Source get more clicks ?

(P.S : Due to his compulsion, I'm not going to reveal the website.)

I wouldn't have thought there is a connection between him changing the licence on his software and ths amount of clicks he got, Not directly anyway.

Did he "get more clicks" or get an "increased CTR"?

If he just got more clicks but kept the same CTR i would say he was getting more visitors sinse releasing software under thr GPL and the increase in visitors meant he got an increase in clicks. I don't think people are more likely to clicks ads just because he now creates open source software.

I know people who click ads just because it's open source. And let's not forget that open source is a buzz word. Yesterday I saw two older women 50s at least that were talking about open source and Linux. I could hear they had no clue about anything, but it's still there, people talk and some day people know and understand too.

Well, his CTR increased. He didn't even change the position of his Ads. Is this possible ? I mean, maybe people felt, "wow, what a nice dude, maybe I can help him by clicking these ads". Does Open Source have this advantage ?

Originally Posted by astrojith

Well, his CTR increased. He didn't even change the position of his Ads. Is this possible ? I mean, maybe people felt, "wow, what a nice dude, maybe I can help him by clicking these ads". Does Open Source have this advantage ?

It doesn't have that effect on me. But if enough people are seeing CTR increase when they change the licence on thier software the logical conclusion would be that the licence change encouraged people to click the ads

It could also just be that the ads themselves provided more relevant content (links to open source resources, sites, etc) that visitors wanted to check out.

Ads for open source would probably be along the lines of links to "Free" resources, which tend to generate more clicks.

That's true that the ads changed increasing CTR. I could also see where people would click ads on a site with open source software with the thought that they'd be helping to support it.

It could also just be something temporary.

Use a javascript date code to add the current date in the headline will increase your CTR, you can google "date script" to find one.