Need Help Refining Ads on Site

http://www.designs4nuke.com

1. Have good traffic - 1,300 unique visitors every day - @ 6,000 page views
2. Adsense CTR sucks - I need help!

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

Looking at your site, your home page contains a lot of good information, only a small part of which are your Adsense ads, which don't relate very well to your content. If you look at your home page, ask yourself why someone would click on one of those ads after coming to your site to find the information you provide.

Low CTR 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 compelling/satisfying/distracting that visitors have no reason or desire to click on ads for addtional information, even though the ads may be relevant.

Some sites just don't work well with Adsense. It would be wrong to assume that any site can be successfully monitized by simply including Adsense ads. The choice is oftentimes between a good site for your visitors, or a good site for Adsense. Some of us are lucky in that our sites work well for both.

 

I would focus more on converting people to $24.95 per year memberships than AdsSense. AdSense is a bonus.
My main business is selling subscriptions to a commodtiy market analysis website. I put AdSense on the "free" pages and keep the subscriber pages clean of ads. With AdSense, visitors account for around 3% of revenue.
However, my first impression when I visited your website was that there were no AdSense ads there. After checking out your post a second time and looking harder, I saw the ads. You need to find a way to make them stand out visually, while still staying within the theme of your site and NOT competing with membership sales. Perhaps, use the same background colkor as on the right hand side of the page -- but only with AdSense.

 

A couple things. First - You lose the ad visually in 800x600. Maybe you just have too much content on the main page period. Scale down, and scale down the width of the page as well.

Second- move that 300 wide ad more into view. top right is a bad place from my experience. Get it more toward the center of your content. Or maybe try a banner underneath your header logo, change the links to 4 links and put it in the blue bar up top.

Those are ideas I would try.

 

One more thought, if you leave the link bar up where it is, change the text to red. I barely notice it as it is, and combined with my eyes never making contact with the ad on the right, I can see how CTR is not good.

 

Thanks for the review and suggestions. All of them are good and clancy's suggestion of converting more subscriptions is well recieved! I will research & think about the best way to accomplish this.