There are lot of oppurtunities to improve Suggestion 1: Add A Google Link in top of this table News Forums Wiki Search Astra Herald Ladder IRC Links Staff Ventrilo Site Map 2. After the image "gun factor" ,add a horizontal link ad 3. Regarding forum ad , see how digital point displays ad in the forum 4. Each Page can have a either 336*280 ad in left top, another 160*600 ad in right top
You must list down your poor performing pages first, then change those only. You might end up doing changes on the good perfoming page if you're not careful and end up lowering your CTR even further. As the saying goes, if it ain't broken, don't fix it. I suspect that most of your traffic is from the forums, which are known to get low CTR's and CPC's. Moving the ads around or changing their sizes don't normally help much. What you ought to do is get the forummers to visit other non forum pages within your site that has adsense on. Information like announcements, tips, tricks and stuff that forummers are usually looking for, must be placed outside of the forum. Do a short description of what they are looking for and place a link to the appropriate page. And place your ads in the middle of the page! 336x280 (i think) will do. I hope this helps. If it does, dont forget, $500!
Make the visitors have less choices of links to click on. In other words, make the navigation links under Community, Information, Guides etc not show, and rather make them only show by expanding the categories when they are clicked on. F.ex if a user clicks Community the links for it will appear. Then put a skyscraper, or one of the smaller ad units like the one you are allready using on the right side of your page, just above or below your navigation bar. And put a leaderboard ad unit on top of the page below your sites logo. This way you will have a total of 3 ad units showing above the fold and it should increase the CTR alot.
I don't think you should listen to peopel telling you to compromise your sites integrity by throwing big blocks of adsense around. I can understand your concerns and quite frankly I am the same. I have adsense on my site, but just to the extend that it does not annoy my visitors and that they choose to come back. I am also getting a bunch of links from link bait and I doubt they would link to a spammy looking site. Over time this will increase traffic beyond the point where I make more with the placement I have right now than I would by throwing big blocks around. Even without those things have I increased my CTR to around 2% from below 0.2%. Further I believe that if people make a decision of clicking the ads instead of clicking by accident and hitting the back button the smartpricing bug can be avoided. So here is what I would suggest in your case (instead of the usual throw up big blocks): -Instead of the 120x240 on the right, use a 160x600 -I would split up the menu on the left (leave the community section where it is and put an ad below). You can either use a button or you can move the entire 160x600 there and the rest of the nav menu to the right (the latter may be better). -Put a link unit below your main banner on top and your content (link units take very little space and don't look out of place) -Put a small banner below the the first post In your forum: main page: -put a link unit above the content (where it says last posts, threads ...) -put banners between the sections thread: I see you are using banners already, add a link unit somewhere (preferably above the first post). And then, don't get too hung up on this. You seem to enjoy working on your site and your visitors can tell. Don't destroy your reputation. I have managed to keep all my visitors and get new ones after I decided to put ads up. At first it was very disappointing (revenue wise) and my CTR was horrible. Over time with a few very minor tweaks it would increase (it would even go up without me touching anything).
- Move the menu to the right - Place a 120x600 ad (or 160x600, your call) on the left - 468x60 after first post
Forgot to mention: If you feel that my post did anything to increase your CTR, donate the money to Unicef.
I would place a Medium Rectangle (300 x 250) image ad in your second news announcement, centered right in between the post title and the post content. How you would be able to code this depends on your CMS. In your right sidebar, I'd use link units instead of an ad unit block. Good luck.
ha! that's easy. just put a large rectangle in the middle of your site, with some small pictures, same color as your side ads and you'll get a much higher ctr. I get a ctr of over 20% with that. .
Just out of interest, how would someone know whether you have achieved your aim as a result of their advice? By the way, those page view numbers are great! Are you getting all your page views from this site or is there a forum as well?
I would like to say, "anything will be better than what you currently have" A tall tower on the left/right or some sideways half banners spread down through the content would be fine. James.