In this website auction, a site sold for $32,500. That was due in no small part to the fact that it was making $110/day in Adsense revenue! The seller kindly provided some Google Analytics and Adsense data which I took the liberty of saving here. The interesting number is the Adsense CTR. It's a whopping 16.67%. That's high.

If you look at the bottom of the homepage of the site in question, you can see that the theme was created by Dosh Dosh. Perusing the Dosh Dosh site, I found that the theme used is called BlueSense and it is one of their Adsense Optimised themes for Wordpress. They boast there that this theme has a particularly high Adsense CTR. And if that theme can lead to a CTR of 16.67%, you can count me in.

If you look at the BlueSense theme, you can see that visually it's far from stunning. In fact, it would have those posh Wordpress designers squirming in their seats if they looked at it too long. But that's not important. The important point is that it converts.

I thought I'd try out BluSense to see whether it would improve the CTR on one of my sites. The site I chose as a guinea pig has the following attributes:

• Unique visitors/month: 4,783
• Pageviews/month: 9,872
• Adsense CTR: much, much less than the fabled 16.67%!

I chose this particular site because there should be enough traffic to gauge whether the theme works. My only concern is that the site is in a techie niche and we all know that techies are too cool to click Adsense.

Installing The Adsense Optimised Theme

Installing the theme is no different to installing any other (Appearance > Themes > Install Themes > Upload > Activate). However, after installing the theme you will see on your site the Adsense that belongs to Dosh Dosh. Anyone clicking on those ads will be lining Dosh Dosh pockets.

Dosh Dosh make it easy for you to locate the places where you need to replace the Adsense code with your own, so it's a simple case of looking at the existing Adsense code to see what ad dimensions are required, generating that Adsense code for yourself and then replacing their code with yours.

To get to the theme's files, click Appearance > Editor. You'll need to replace the existing Adsense code with your own in the following places:

• header_adverts.php
• single_bottom_adverts.php
• single_top_adverts.php
• sidebar.php
• menu.php

We now await the inevitable avalanche of funds into my Adsense account. If I'm not too busy sorting out new holiday homes in Barbados, I'll report back with an update on how my test site is doing.

One more thing. Don't forget to re-add your traffic tracking code! If that rings alarm bells, you might find How to add Google Analytics to Wordpress comforting.

Update 13/12/2009: Well, I've been trialling the BluSense theme for 19 days now and here are the results. The CTR for this site has been halved (boo!) by the use of BlueSense, but revenue has doubled (hurrah!). This apparent paradox is explained by the fact that I'm now using more units than I was before BlueSense. I never was one for displaying Adsense everywhere, but one thing I might try is reinstating the old theme I was using and adding Adsense units to the same locations as BlueSense. Then I'll get the same "coverage", but I'll also be using the old colour scheme/layout which might induce a higher CTR. The thing to remember always is that you should be tweaking and testing all the time.

The CTR on this site is very low, and nowhere near the fabled 16.67% of the site mentioned above, but I'm sure this is due to the nature of the visitors to each site. The typical techie who visits my site won't be so click-happy as the less savvy visitor to a site about nursing.