Please review the Adsense placement on my celebrity blog

I have recently changed my blog design to look a little more professional (I know it doesn't look too professional, but it's much better than it was before), but have found that my CTR dropped. It wasn't good before either, but now it's horrible.

Can anyone give me any suggestions on the ads placement (and maybe also on the overall design)? I have stared at my blog for such a long time that I lost all ability to judge that for myself.

The blog is Skinny Celebrities.

(Also, I'm using A/B testing for all of my ads, so you might notice they look different if you refresh the page.)

Please give me your suggestions, criticism, etc. Thanks!

Anna

 

Hmm... I would try making your square ad an image ad instead of text since there's lots of text around the site already, might have a better ctr!

 

you can give that a shot and track it. but typically image ads do not perform well.....

Also, i saw an 728x90 ad in the grey area on top and it had a whit backgorud. looked off. i would blend the baclground of the ad to match the grey...

 

I am currently A/B testing text ad vs. image ad... though I guess the text ad will be the winner, the image ads are so unrelated to the content!

I was also A/B testing - gray background vs. white background, as it seemed to me the grey one would be totally unnoticeable. Since then, I change the leaderboard into a link unit, we'll see how that goes.

Do you think adding a 468x60 banner above the content would help? (It seemed like a good idea to me, but when I tried implementing it, in Firefox it looked ok, but in IE it didn't show up right. Do you think it's worth the effort of trying to learn CSS to figure out what was wrong just for that?...)

Anyway, thanks a lot for your time!