Poor CTR due to placements?

Hi....

My site is pretty slow at geting revenue...

its click through rating is just 0.33% - is this bad or good?

i have received about 50,000 impressions so far this year

please could someone tell me if they think this is good or not, and where i could imrpove.

my ads are on 2 sites i own:

http://www.pangea-enterprises.net
http://www.nagty.co.nr

thanks

 

for the first one, id say to get rid of the huge "ADVERTISEMENT" across the top and get rid of the dark blue border around the ad. the link color on the second site needs to be changed from blue to red to blend more with the site. im no expert, but i would try that. forums get a low ctr as it is, but with ads that stand out like that it might be bringing it down.

 

Lose the border and put a wide skyscraper directly above the content.

 

Off-Topic.. but isn't the layout for your web design company a template found in Dreamweaver?

 

The click through rate on a website can depend on a variety of factors
In my experience placement is very important - google actually help here with a "heat" type map of which parts of webpages provide the best click through rates
If you look at this map on the Google Adsense website you will see that ads in the left hand column do well as do wide ad blocks just above the start of your main content

However there are other factors

I would say that it is better if you take away all borders and frames round your ads or your content, so that the ads appear to be just part of the content itself. What happens is that when you put a border round something then this marks it out as seprarate - and so people tend to ignore it

If you look at the main google search engine site you will see there is hardly any border to the ads - this is something to emulate when placing your ads. After all if you are an Adwords advertiser you will know 99% of your clicks come from google itself not from content sites - therefore I think there is value in keeping the format the same so that when people come to your site they are used to the ads being on the right and the content on the left. However you will need to do some testing on this for your site

There is one thing far more important even than placement - and that is content. If you have lots of real unique content - ie articles you have written yourself carefully niched towards some keyword phrase that people are likely to be typing in when doing searches on search engines

You will find some types of content will always get clicks - while other content - i.e. subject matter will hardly ever get clicks. This is why its important to do some good research on the "niche" and the keywords you target - ideally before you put your site together

The other very important thing is - where is your traffic coming from
The quality of you're traffic is very important in getting clicks
If your traffic comes from "doggy" sources like guaranteed hits, click exchanges, paid to read etc etc - then you can be virtually certain no one will ever click anything - and more important no one will ever buy anything either

Do remember that thousands of any old hits - does not equal thousands of clicks or sales. The best traffic is always targeted - what some people call qualified traffic
You can get thousands of garbage hits every day but they will never convert to anything e.g. a click on an ad or a sale of your products or affiliate links etc. Qualified traffic on the other hand will usually give much better results - i.e. people have seen something about your site like a banner, a text ad, an article, a search engine listing etc and decided to click through to your site

Hope that might help you a little bit

 

I followed the "heat map" from google on one of my sites and got almost immediate better results. Putting ads within the content, not just outside of it really helps.

 

for the forum i suggest that the url ads = green, change it to black like text
because 2 color is work better for me