Ad placement review please!

Hi all,

Can you take a quick look at www.theobservant.co.uk and let me know what you think of the ad placement? I've set Adsense to rotate with another couple of banners for articles in the header, plus have a skyscraper in the right hand column.

If you click on one of the articles you'll also see I have some adlinks at the bottom of each news story.

Thanks for any suggestions you can offer!

Baz

 

Nice site, nice ad placement. I have one question: is the banner working for you? I have the feeling that in news sites banners generally don't work well - people are tired of banners.

 

Hi Bubblejet,

Hard to tell at the minute as there's very little traffic yet. I think I'm going to do away with the AdSense banner at the top though and just make it rotating ads for stories within the site itself. Or maybe I'll sign up to a good banner exchange and use that space for those banner ads instead. Either way going to take the AdSense out as I don't really want visitors clicking away to an advertiser before they've even read the page!

 

Ok. One suggestion more: you should try an ad link unit. The vertical one fits just fine in your site but I prefer the horizontal one, placed below the banner blended with the colors of your site.

 

just my opinion but in my experience, the sidebar on the right serves no purpose. people don't click on those ads. at least on my site they dont. I would move your right sidebar over to the left, move content to the right, and then embed a box unit inside the article. Like half way through the article put the ad, then continue with the article. Or put it at the bottom of your article.

 

Okay, I initially tried switching the far right column over to the left but it looks terrible, so I've switched the one that was just to the right of the content to the left hand side and put the content in the middle. I'm not sure what I think of it. I think I prefered it the other way, so I may switch it back and risk the drop in CTR.

Love some more opinions though!

 

Interestingly though, I just checked my Adsense channel stats and of the all the clicks the ads have had about 75% of them have been in the right hand column. Be interesting to see if this changes with the new placement.

 

The secret of all this is testing, testing, testing...