Help with ad placement and CTR

I've been a member of adsense for awhile now, but my site traffic is so low, I hadn't messed with it much. Now, I want to try and maximize it, and I am having serious problems raising my CTR. I saw somwhere that average CTR was 2%? Well, I'm way, way, way below that. I've been trying different colors, borders, no borders, blending, garish, different placements, and I'm even trying Chitika on one of my sites. Why, oh why, can't I get the CTR up?

Anyway, I have two sites.

http://profparadox.transplantcomics.com -- Prof. Paradox, A Webcomic.

and...

http://transplantcomics.com -- Transplant Comics, A Webcomic Community.

The first site, Prof. Paradox, gets about 100 impressions a day. Transplant Comics gets about 200 a day. I'm lucky if I get 1 click a week. Any help would be truly appreciated!

Sorry, I couldn't make those links, I'm new here and the board won't let me.

 

http://profparadox.transplantcomics.com/ - 728x90 banner on top I would make brighter
Also I would suggest you placing 468x60 before each topic instead of those banners in text

http://transplantcomics.com/ - it looks too overcrowded for me and I would close that site immediately

 

Prof. Paradox site -- Thank you. I will make those changes and see where it gets me. What do you think about putting a 120x600 adspace in the side bar, instead of the ads in the posts? Should I put a dark blue border around the 728x90 header adspace, in addition to lightening it up?

Transplant Comics -- I'm not ready to throw the baby out with the bath water. I would, however, be willing to do a complete front page redesign, if that's what it needed. I completely agree that it looks over-crowded. It has some seious design/orginization issues. The problem with Transplant is that the comics section is growing, and I have no good ideas how to deal with that. Any ideas on size, placement or any thing else on Transplant would be good. Do you know of any URL's with similar design concerns, that actually deal with it nicely? Do you know of any general design philosophies that might point me in the right direction?

Thank you again, for taking the time to look. I do appreciate it.

 

I prefer horizontal banners before each post, but you can try 120x600 in sidebar if you wish. BTW do not hope to get results after a day or two. Wait at least for a week.

Sorry, but I'm not interested in comics so do not know any sites which I could suggest.

 

Low CTRs are the result of two things: 1) low ad interest to the people visiting the page, and 2) inferior ad placement and format. Low ad interest can result from 1) ads not relevant to content, 2) content (and ads) not of interest to visitors (why did they come?), and 3) content is so good/satisfying/distracting that visitors have no reason or desire to click on ads for addtional information, even though the ads may be relevant.

The ads on the first site seem to be pretty relevant to the content, although visitors to your site don't actually know what content they are going to find there (blog format) -- and may discover after arriving that they are not interested in either the content or any ads that are related to that content.

Possibly, if you had some introductory text on the page that was rich in key words that relate to the general interests of the type of people who visit your site -- Google would have a better shot at displaying ads that are of more interest to your type of visitors -- and your CTR would go up.

As for the second site (comics), I'm not sure what to suggest. The Adsense ads don't seem to be relevant to anything on the page, and certainly not about the page in general (comics). I think you have to decide what you want the Adsense ads to be about, and create some permanent content that helps steer the ads in that direction.

Good luck.