Why is my CTR so horrible? I have no idea what else I can improve... The Last 7 days I've gotten 4,600 impressions, 5 clicks for a total of $1.83 Whats going on... you can check out the site its in my sig.
My suggestion is don't make your ads blend. Work with multiple palettes. Your blending might be a little to good, lol. Try it out for a week; your CPC seems to be good, all you need is some clicks!
It's a good idea to use different placements, colors in forums. If you use the same placement and colors, forum members will become ad blind by seeing same stuff again and again.
Check out our forum and adsense it does quite well Place some adsense as catergories Mod so the first post per thread will add a sponsered add below it Make your adsense display in the header Change the colors from blend to bright.... google_color_border = ["0066CC","B3B3B3","E1771E","000000"]; google_color_bg = ["C3D9FF","E6E6E6","FFFFCC","000033"]; google_color_link = ["0000FF","0000FF","0000FF","66B5FF"]; google_color_text = ["000000","CC0000","800040","FFFFFF"]; google_color_url = ["66B5FF","999999","FFCC66","7F7F7F"];
Not sure about those ads under the "Welcome to our Forums" board link. Google my consider the image to the left and the fact the ad link is so close to the link of the "Welcome to our Forums" that is against the TOS. Maybe someone with more knowledge on the Google TOS might like to comment but it does look a little "cheeky".
As for first impression, after looking into your forum threads, I see there are really many ads in threads and I don't think it is necessary - look on this forum, how ads are placed. I thing, a little blend, as suggested above with reduction of units number per page, could help.
I think CTR depends mostly on unique visitors rather than returning ones, who keep seeing the same ads and eventually learn to skip right over them.