I run a blog (http://www.legitlifestyle.com) that I started up last month frankly not with the primary intention to monetize, but simply because I wanted to work on the project. Its something I had a passion for, and wanted to express it. My "big goal" is to eventually drive enough traffic to sell banner space (where my affiliate banners are now as they are pretty much useless) and have monthly income generated off the site through that means primary. In the interim i'm using Adsense sparingly on the site. My CTR is abysmal. I was wondering if any of you guys had suggestions or guidelines generally on where the adsene ads are now - and possibly a more optimal place for them. But here's the kicker - I don't want to spam the site with ads - I like how it looks and i'd like to keep the ads minimal. So placing a 338 X 260 on the top of every article isn't exactly what I was going for. That being said - i've tried to work the current ads into the sidebar in between things so they don't "Jump out" at you (maybe thats my first problem?) and I color coded them to fit the theme (basically because I thought it looked better - again, possibly hurting my performance?). Are there any simple ways (either restructuring the adds to be above my banners) or adding a 1 line text link adsene box at the bottom of articles, or changing colors, that would improve performance without hindering the cohesion of the website? Thanks for your help!
yes complement, beautiful site, but increasing the ctr will not be easy, it's because the site has allot of content that takes the attention away from the actual ads. You see, to have allot of clicks on the ads you need for the ads to stand out, almost as if the ads are more important than the actual content, which obviously on your site is not the case. You have to decide which way you want to go, you can't make a site that will be optimized for ads while it grows and then it'll go into something else. start with a plan and stick to it.
Whenever I create a website I will check how big players in my niche set up their websites. This includes ad placement. I won't be guessing anymore. These big websites obviously do well. So why trying to reinvent the wheel? I would suggest you go look for very successful sites in your niche and see how they place their ads.
Why not make your website look a little bit uglier? Try to use a wordpress theme with plain look and make the ads stand out if you want to improve the CTR. It's a proven strategy.
What is your current CTR? Could it be that your CTR is "abysmal" because the traffic to your site is "abysmal"? If that is the case (and I suspect it is) you should first concentrate on getting traffic. Your ad placement is fine, and you did a great job of making it look like a part of your site. I have a few suggestions/comments with regards to Adsense and your site that I hope will help: 1. Your site home page took forever to load, due to that huge 4 photo thing you have at the top of your site. The one with the car, watches etc. Google Adsense now pays attention to the loading time of your web pages. This isn't my opinion, it comes from Matt at the google blog.) You might want to keep that in mind and see if you can do something about it. If this site was one that was promoting a specific product, and the main purpose was to make sales, I would have recommended that you get rid of all that crap including the HUGE Blog, About etc buttons. The reason being is all of that took up my entire browser window and I had to scroll down a whole page to see some text.) But since this is just a blog about something you are passionate about, it does not matter that much. 2. On your home page, I knew where your first Adsense Ad was, but did not see the "Ads by Google" that is supposed to be there. Unless Adsense has changed their policies, you must have that on there. I checked out another page and it was there so it is probably due to a technical website glitch. The only thing you need to worry about is for a real live Google employee not visiting your site. They won't like that very much) Another member suggested that you make your ads stand out more. This is also a valid method of increasing CTR, but depends on your intent. If you are out to try to make money primarily from Adsense, then yes, this is one way to go. Hope this helps. Zeek