Need your experience on my ad placement

I've used three ad units, as recommended by Michael Cheney in his videos & I've tried to match the colours, and also blend them next to images. I've appreciate your thoughts on the site & any suggestions how they could be improved. Many of you have a lot of adsense experience which I'm keen to learn.

The site incorporates the wordpress plugin, Adsense Injection! which moves the 1 set of ads around randomly. I've been advised this is a good thing, otherwise regular views become "blind" to them.

Also, should I move the set in the sidebar - perhaps showing them in the middle of the page of the sidebar instead of the bottom?

Please check out, at dogpuss.com

Thxs

Mark

 

Mark:

What's the URL?

 

Sorry Will, I realised I never entered it as soon as I posted. I must have been editing the post, as you replied!

The url is dogpuss.com

 

THe ads look pretty well placed.

 

Didn't Google disallow that usage of graphics next to AdSense ads?

 

Did they?

I noticed Joel Comm, was using it in his templates which he recently launched. I did email adsense support about it, as I read a similar thread in a forum saying they sometimes frowned on it. Their answer was pretty generic saying the page compiled but they "constantly monitor all of the web pages displaying Google ads or an AdSense for search box. If we find that one of your web pages violates our policies, we will notify you and ask you to
remove the Google code from that page."

 

Hmmm... I may try it tonight.

 

GOogle still allows images near the ads. YPN is the one that doesn't.

 

Your site is not showing well on firefox..

 

Hmmm... his site looks fine in Firefox to me.

What is your screen resolution?

Can you post a screen capture of what you are seeing?

 

Yeah right ... I want to see it.

 

Back on topic for a moment, I think that your ad placement looks very good.

I see that your AdSense images are all in one graphic block.

You might try instead to randomize the images. I created this quick PERL script to do this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

#====================== Edit ============================

$basedir="";

@img = ("image1.jpg",
"image2.jpg",
"image3.jpg"
);



#====================== Done ============================

srand($$ & time ^ $$);
$imgnum = rand(@img); 

print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";

print "<table width=728px align=center><tr>";

for (my $images = 1; $images <= 4; $images++) {
        $imgnum = rand(@img); 
        print "<td><img src=/banner-images/";
        print "@img[$imgnum]";
        print "></a></td>";
}

print "</tr></table>";

$imgnum = ""; 

Code (markup):

This is called in HTML like this:

<!--#exec cgi="/cgi-bin/random-banner.pl" -->

Code (markup):

 

I am not a pro, but from my looking at them, I say they are placed very well

 

Is it a problem for you that, at 800x600, all the visitor sees are AdSense ads?

Everything else is below the fold.

 

AuctionFreak:

Your design looked intriguing, so I implemented something like it at The Tech FAQ - 728x90.

Wow -- CTR fell to less than half of normal levels.

You might want to take a look at The Tech FAQ - 336x280 instead.

You say Joel Comm is selling this?

 

Will,

Many thanks for the randomize script. I'll be sure to try that out & I'm pretty sure it should increase the ctr - although of course only testing will tell in due course. I'll also, try the 336*280 instead and run a split test between them.

Many thanks for your opinions so far.

 

Images need to have a border around them otherwise it's against Google TOS. They need to be distinct from the ads. Might be worth changing for the Big G tells you to

 

even though you have pretty good gap between images and ads but still i would suggest you to either put a visible border around the ads or get this verified with google cos' they have suggested many to have the border when using the pictures.

Also try not to put pictures that are too similar to the content of the article