Hey, I'm looking for a new theme for my website. One that will hopefully bring my CTR up from its current level of below 1% My CTR stinks even though my ads are in the "hot" spots. I think the problem is they stand out as ads too much so people ignore them. I would like them to blend better like Askthebuilder. Has anyone ever researched this or know what themes blend adsense the best to maximize your CTR??? Thanks for suggestions - oh my url is in the signature if you want to peek at what i got presently.
You're very right about the ads looking too much like ads. And as people are trained to be ad-blind, there's clearly an issue. I've got many adsense-oriented sites myself and during the last year or so I've experimented with 20ish different templates. What I've found out is that one particular template, BlueSense (google for it), gives an enormously better CTR than any others. I'm slowly moving all my PPC sites over to this very template (or its modifications). When you look it up, you'll first discover that the template looks oh so ugly. I completely agree and it was pretty hard for me to use something like this on a site that used to look neat and nice - but what matters is the money, right? And seriously, you need people to click on your ads not to enjoy their time on your site. I have to say though that this kind of templates apply only for sites that have adsense as their main (or preferably the only) source of income. If the site in question (I just had a quick peak at it) gains anything from mailing list building, repeat visits etc. etc. then I suggest to take it a little easier and go with something in between your current design and Bluesense as with a proper adsense-optimized template you can't expect any repeat-visitors
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