Any expert opinions?

Hey,

I've been working on my paintball blog like crazy the last few months.

I feel fairly confident in my current ad placements. I do have half vertical banners on the left, that's pretty rare from my seeings, but it's performing pretty well.

Can anybody give me some opinion on my current ad placements? What about text/background color?

 

Looks good - i would make these comments:

• You might consider changing the guns pointing right at the ads to something else. this MIGHT be construed as attracting unnatural attention to the ads
• Perfect ad blending means nothing without traffic.. Now get out there and start getting visitors! (unless you're already getting bukoo uniques per day..

 

You definitely need borders between ads and images.

 

while i'm not an expert:

- you are displaying too many posts on the main page. users should be able to see ads at all times.
- images near the left ad unit will not work. because that ad unit will never ever display four ads. so, users are not going to visually associate images with ads.

 

Yea that crossed my mind as well. I may flip them horizontally, however that would look ugly I think. I think Google would understand. My intention really isn't to get more clicks, it just looks better like that. Maybe I'll email them.

I'm getting roughly 1k uniques a day with 1300 ad impressions (not sure how that works).

Thanks Tearabite, I appreciate your feedback.

So would you suggest using two images instead of four, and just enlarging the two?

What do you mean by "users should be able to see ads at all time"? How is that relevant to how many posts are per page?

 

yes, there should be two images in my opinion.

when users scroll down to see all the main page content, they are losing contact with the ads. so, when they have scrolled down to the middle of the content, even if they have the motivation to click on the ads, they won't, because they won't be seeing any...

my suggestion is:
- add a right sidebar (without removing the left one).
- remove the ads on the left sidebar.
- move some of the left sidebar's content (like categories or archive) to the right sidebar.
- put 2 x 160x600 ads on the right sidebar.

this way, you will have ads with 1200px height. users will see them most of the time, and also they can not develop blindness to the ads, because you also have some content on that sidebar.

i know, this is a lot of work. but trust me, it worked for my sites. it may work for you too.