Placement, TOS, and Colour Help with Adsense

I run a fairly popular website at http://www.gunzfactor.com

I'm getting ~6,000 uniques per day and somewhere in the net of 2 million impressions per month, but I'm barely breaking even. My server costs $300 a month, and we barely make that. We're more or less interested in atleast making enough so that we dont have to rely on donations from our members to pay the server costs each month.

I have a few questions:

1. Should I have better/different placements?
2. Should I change my colours?
3. Is the ad on the leftnav against the TOS?
4. Would the ad on the leftnav be against the TOS if the background and the border were the same colour?

Thanks,
-Cit

 

My opinion:

1. Move the Ad you have on right under the Community menu.
2. Try to make the size of the link same size with the title of the ads
3. Ad in left nav is not against TOS.
4. Try to blend your ads with the content

But i think most important si moving the ad from left under your Community menu.

I think this will increase your CTR with 50-100%

 

in the left navi the ad is at the bottom...try putting it at the top or some where in between...(i guess this is the best)

also with the colors...its ok
if u want to blend more try using a darker shade of Grey for the headinds as in ur other headings in the navi bar and white for the remaning part.

 

If you're getting 2million impressions, you might want to try a CPM advertising networking. It's possible you'd make more money than with PPC. Casale and fastclick are two I've seen mentioned that are good for high impression sites

By the way, I like the site's layout.

Good luck, mate.

 

I think the problem is with the ads your being served - When I visitied, Google was serving web hosting ads on both ad panels - likely because of all the "server" talk in the news section. And on the other pages, I'm getting ads for ladies leater coats, gold, and some more web hosting. You know your users better than me, but how interested do you think they are in the ads being shown? If they're not interested, they're not going to click on the ads.

I'd edit your pages to include a few keywords which will allow the google spider to serve more relevant ads. I can't even really work out what the site is about - is it some sort of RPG? And if I can't work it out, then the google spider certainly can't. For an idea of what keywords to use, just type them into google, and see what ads it shows as paid results on the right there. When you find some ads that will be of interest to your users, then spread those keywords around your pages. As a side result, it probably won't harm your SERP rankings either.

Hope this is of help.

Cheers,

Jason

 

For a gaming site, who will click on ads for hosting, servers, gold, etc?
You need to put some good relevant material in the site to get some relevant ads.

$300 a month for a server?
I am going to go into the server business at this type of cost.

 

I think he's getting server ads because he's currently talking a lot about his new servers.

But in any case, there's PLENTY of ways to maximize your revenues. Here are some suggestions:

A leaderboard adlink at the top, underneath the top banner (make the link color white so it'll stand out, the background black, etc.) Then put 336 boxes at the bottom of all your individual pages.

And as someone else suggests, sign up for a CPM network, and put skys on the side and a leaderboard at the bottom, and that will easily cover your $300 server cost and give you plenty of change for beers on Fridays.

 

Thanks for the advice guys!