Placement on a art book review blog

Here's a typical review entry on my site, for the book Art of Kung Fu Panda. My blog contains other stuff, but now I'm focusing on art book reviews since I collect quite a bit.


http://parkablogs.blogspot.com/2008/08/book-review-art-of-kung-fu-panda.html

------------ adsense section ------------

For August 2008, I had 9345 page impressions and 29 clicks, making a total of $8.07. I've only started putting in ads this month so not much data to go about.

The average CTR is about 0.3%.

What do you guys think of my ad placement so far?

I've a small book cover picture floated to the left. When people read, they go to the right, where my ads are.

My main block of ad is on the middle column. There's 4 text unit skyscraper on top of my Amazon astore ad, and another 1 text unit square adsense below it. I'm using the Amazon astore image to draw attention to the ads. Does it work?

I've also put the video link up close to the ads. So there's more ad time as people view the videos. Otherwise, they will just scroll down the images very quickly and miss the ads. Or should I just put the video link near the amazon affiliate links?

------------ amazon affiliate links ------------

At the bottom of my entries are affiliate links to amazon.com.

These amazon links have 13380 impressions with a CTR of 0.8% giving me 122 clicks. These clicks converted to orders at 4.9% (I shipped 6 orders). But didn't earn as much as adsense.

Any comments on the affiliate links?

------------ other stuff ------------

I'm using Google Analytics to track visits. Using Site Overlay feature, I see that people are clicking on my provided links more than archive and labels. Do these contribute to a loss of clicks as they leave my page?

Should I remove the labels since no one's clicking on them?

These art book pages make up to 30% of all unique pageviews.
I expect them to grow next month as I add more reviews.

 

Dear Parka,

You have done a good ads placement.

In my view if you add 728 x 15 Horizontal row just below the header it swill be good.

You are basically getting a low CTR.

ry the following tips and see how your CTR increases dramatically.

1. Make your ads visible above the fold. Statistics have proved that ads which are visible without scrolling generates highest clicks. Another reason is that the ads will look like normal web links that visitors are used to click on them. Also the large rectangle ad format has proven to be the highest CTR generator.

2. Make your ads blend with your site content. Make sure that your ads background and border color are same as your content background. Ad text and URL should have the same color as that of the font color of your ads. And Make the link color to that of your web pages link color.

3. Make use of set of special comments to tell the Adsense spiders about your main content. This will help AdSense to serve more relevant ads based on your content. And more relevant content means more clicks.

4. Write keyword rich, grammatically correct juicy posts. This will make people read them and spiders will serve the best ads related to your keywords. Make sure you have some large content. Don't place ads on pages with 2 lines of content.

5. Make use of custom channels from your Adsense console. Analyze your stats and tweak settings so that you get the highest CTR. Keep records of all the changes you do and measure your results periodically.

Apply these techniques and you will definitely see a dramatic increase in your CTR.

Hope this helps you

Regards

Tehmina