Ad Placement help - should change the colours?

Hi,
I am having poor ctr rates less then 0.5%
Has anyone got any ideas for the header and footer ads, do I need to add colour?

Site: http://www.newdesignworld.com

thanks

 

I would suggest you place adsense on the sidebar or where it now says Welcome To NewDesignWorld, place a big square adsense. The colors you have are fine. some recommend to use the default blue becuase many recognize those as clickable links, but I've heard others that say that color doesn't really matter

 

I think you should add some color to your adsense ad (it looks too blended into the layout, you need the link to standout so that visitors can view it, yet blended well so that it doesn't look obvious that it's an ad).

Anyways, what you can do is change the link name to blue (standard link color) so it stands out a bit from all of the black text above there.

 

Your design is very crowded - it's horrid from a usability standpoint. Even if you weren't looking to optimise for Adsense, I'd recommend seeing what you can do about redesigning things. The present design is so crowded that I just intuitively tune out the stuff at the edges and focus on the content in the middle. This means I don't just skip your ads - I skip the links you placed in the margins.

Your top banner is placed in an area I would not intuitively look at - it took me a while to find out where your ads where, actually. It's not really a colour issue, unless you intend to keep the ads where they are. It's more of a placement problem. I'd recommend putting the banner around the top-left quadrant of the page - perhaps somewhere near where the left sidebar is currently. Maybe experiment with one of the more successful formats, like a 336*280 or 300*250 rectangle? Placing it inline with your content would boost CTR.

The leaderboard at the bottom is also poorly placed. Anyone who reaches that far is probably going to tune it out. You could try placing it at the end of your main content (just below the mailing list and pagerank checker links), and/or using a large rectangle.

These are just my thoughts - I'm far from an Adsense pro, but speaking as a webmaster, this is what I'd do if I wanted to draw attention to the ads without fostering ad-blindness.