Ad placement for Baseball Forum

Construction is currently under way for my washington nationals fan forum. I am curious what you guys think about the ad placement. The only page that has been designed is the homepage. Thanks for your feedback.

 

It's kind of hard to tell without content. You can't really figure out how the ads and content mesh, etc. But I think it's been proven that Adsense skys are dead money.

 

The Google heatmap for forums has the hottest area as the left hand sky on a forum, anyone have experience using the google heatmap for forums ?

 

I apologize for my ignorance, but... What do you mean by "adsense sky?"

 

The Adsense skyscraper banner.

 

Oh ok. Your talking about the left column then. Hmm, on one of my other sites i have the skyscraper on the right side and it does better than any other placement on that site. What would you reccomend instead of the skyscraper?

 

Hmm, interesting. Well, if it does better, I guess you should keep it.

 

kk. In the forum section of the site I was thinking of doing something similar to what DP does; After the first post in a thread, there will be a banner ad beneath it. Unless the user is logged in, there will only be that thin ad strip. What you think of that? And there wont be the skyscraper on the left.

 

Sounds like a winner.

 

BILZ I would recommend moving the link box under the nav and matching all fonts and colors to the link box...basic rule of thumb to keeping return visitors from being "ad-immune" by kind of sneaking ads into their point of attention just so atleast they would notice it...

Also think about simple rules of art, people follow lines, so I would recommend when you ad the content in that grey box (which I think you should change to white) make sure to have some horizontol lines that lead to the skyscraper ad on the right, oh yeah put it on the right it works better....

Kind of like this...

 

Great advice! Thanks. I'll try to implement those ideas.

Also, the dark box at the top right was going to have an ad also. Is this too much you think?

 

Yeah and wouldn't recomend putting ads on background colors different from regular content's backgroun colors.

 

I do something similar to that on my forum and it works quite well.

Here's a direct link if you want to take a look:

www.defend.net/deluxeforums/

Tim