As you guys probably all know, I have been experimenting around a lot lately and have yet to find anything groundbreaking when it comes to increasing CTR. Is there a line where I and others alike should just say, "That's the ad placement and it's not changing!"? Seriously guys. What better ad placement can their be then an ad unit under your post titles (with some separation by other things so you don't break tos) and some link units under your header or on the sidebar navigation? Colors obviously depend on your theme. However it's greatly noted that there shouldn't be borders, there shouldn't be a background color, the description should be black, the URL gray or black, and the link color should be whatever color the links are on your site although blue performs best. What has our hours on end of ad color and ad placement accomplished us? Most of us, nothing. No increase in revenue whatsoever and if there is an increase, it's only by 5 or 10 measly pennies. So why do we keep trying to increase our AdSense clicks when it hasn't happened yet. It's like the old lady that always buys the lottery tickets. I guess you can't win if you don't play. It's almost as if we're wasting our time. Instead of messing around with AdSense colors every morning, how about we create more and extra content? Content is what's really going to get us paid. I don't know. I am just sick of trying different layouts and having nothing work. This is the last one I am trying and if it doesn't work, I am going back to how I had things originally. So I am telling you guys and myself alike the following. We need to stop messing around with our layouts, look at some professional sites, and see how they have things set up. Then, let's set up our ads how the pro's do it, or how I stated above, which is usually how the pro's do it. Then let's LEAVE it alone. Just my 2 cents.
I agree with you for the most part. I think that a majority of ppl focus too much on placement/color schemes for their ads and not enough time on driving quality traffic (targeted, organic from SERPs) to their sites. They wonder why their CTR is so low (less than 1%) with 5000 hits/day. There are different ways to determine the best placement for your ads such as the google heatmap and online tools like crazyegg.com. It's not rocket science to see which size ads and placement work the best for your niche. I say you should devote more of your time to build backlinks while putting up unique content. Just my thoughts.
Jon Legers Script lets you figure it out the right way... by actually seeing what colors, sizes, and links are clicked on and where your traffic comes from. Without the analytics you are still just guessing. His is not the only script, but it's a good one.