Site: GoMadden.com Problem: Single post pages I'm having some difficulties generating from adsense on our site. The niche is video games (I already recognize this will knock CTR rates down), but more specifically football video games. This appeals to sports stores, video game manufactures etc. We're actually getting what I think is an O.K. PPC, however we simply aren't getting enough of them. Our content pages generate the most amount of impressions as we're syndicated in Google News, so that is my primary focus. The problems: The leaderboard ad at the top of content pages does dreadful in CTR, which surprises me because you would suspect it'd have at least the best CTR on the page. In reality, it's almost as poor as our forum leaderboard. Because of the low CTR, we've swapped it with adbrite/affiliate rotation to help raise the click value on our best performing unit below it (the 300x250 sidebar box). This has worked to that extent, however we're making less on the bottom line because we only have one real ad in display right now (the 300x250 box), because the top banner still gets poor CTR across different networks. We have six sponsor ad slots at the bottom right of the sidebar (this appears in a more prominent position on the front page) for direct ad sales, which we want to be able to keep. We also have a "Get your free guide for visiting" text notification at the bottom of each post, which we also would like to keep... so where can we fit another ad? Or what can we do to improve the CTR for our top banner? The sidebar news with images must stay as well, because it adds a lot of value to our landing pages.
UPDATE: I've centered my top banner now to see if that helps. I noticed a popular site in our niche doing the same thing. It doesn't look very good with it centered (and it also means remove our Join Community button at the top), however we'll see if it generates more clicks. There has to be some reason one of the top sites in my niche has theirs in such a similar fashion, perhaps it just performs better this way.