Emanuele Feronato

Talking about Blogging, Monetize and WordPress.

Since I removed all network ads from the blog, I found the average WordPress theme has a lot of empty space, if you don’t plan to insert network ads.

Just look at the most common blogs around, and imagine them without AdSense, BuySellAds and every other network ad. They will feel pretty empty. But actually those empty spots should be replaced with something which looks less like “please click me, I have bills to pay” while bringing in some cash.

That’s why I placed these products on the top of the blog:

It’s very nice to see, I am not begging for clicks, and I am showing something which will help blog readers to develop their games.

We have, from left to right, my first book, the source code of 12 AS2 commercial games, and my latest book. I started tracking clicks from January 1st, and 100,000 unique visitors later I am about to share with you some stats and considerations about it.

The first interesting thing in my opinion is the overall clickthrough. Look at this chart:

On 107,725 unique visitors, only 1,033 of them clicked at least one item in the banner. That’s less than 1%, but fairly higher than the 0.1%-0.3% average click through rate reported on Wikipedia.

So we have these 1033 unique clicks, let’s see which item got the highest number of clicks:

Both books have almost the same clickthrough, which is pretty lower than the game pack, although it’s AS2. This probably means readers are looking for a ready to go source code, or maybe that’s because it’s in the middle of the banner and people are more attracted by it. I think I will rotate the banners for the next 100K visitors to see what happens.

Now, as you can see, all items has three clickable spots: the image, the title and the “buy” or “get” link. Let’s see where readers clicked:

It seems readers are more attracted by text than images, and do not like to click on “buy” links.

Now, some raw data for your use:

Unique visitors: 107,725
Clicks: 1,033
Clicks on Flash Dev Book: 307
Clicks on AS2 Game Pack: 460
Clicks on Box2D book: 266
Clicks on text titles: 467
Clicks on images: 396
Clicks on buy/get link: 170
Clicks on Flash Dev Book text: 129
Clicks on Flash Dev Book image: 129
Clicks on Flash Dev Book buy: 47
Clicks on AS2 Game Pack text: 201
Clicks on AS2 Game Pack image: 164
Clicks on AS2 Game Pack buy: 95
Clicks on Box2D book text: 137
Clicks on Box2D book image: 103
Clicks on Box2D book buy: 26

Hope this will be useful when you want to start selling your own items. More experiments to come.