ContentAds Pro

The owner of ThemeLib kindly asked me to review his site. He gets about 1500 unique visitor a day and has a high PR. This site has a lot of potential to make significant revenue from ads. He also has the positions sorted out quite nicely.

Here’s a screenshot of his homepage:

Three ad delivery systems are used here. The owner has been selling advertising spots for a fixed rate at position 4. I can not make a lot of changes to this as this is bringing steady income and is always a good idea when you have a successful blog. Also this position can not be changed because the advertisers bought that specific spot.

All in all the site is well-designed and ads fit in pretty well.

Ad Position 1 is a spot that is sort of risky, because the menu above it has drop down lists in it and this is actually against google standards and may get the user banned if they find out. It is a good spot and has high potential, especially if the colouring is altered a bit to fit more with the menu above it. To keep this position one can take the risk and change nothing. A better idea would be to remove the drop down or have them slide horizontally or have them slide out to the top.  I altered the colouring of this spot, as you can see below, so it does not look exactly like the menu but does attract attention and offers a user a point to go to, if the menu does not offer what their looking for.

All in all the homepage has good ad placemen and ad position 2 should definitely stay the same. A visual ad in this spot is probably providing quite some income.

The user also uses infoLinks (ad spot 3) to supply highlighted keywords with additional ads. He might consider removing them from the homepage and only using them in the posts as it might distract the user from going deeper into the site. This website probably has quite a lot of subscribers and these people visit regularly, they will quickly become aware of the different ads and will quickly notice these green labelled links on all pages so the might become adblind on these. Also the styling of the AdSense textlink blocks on each page may need to be randomized to prevent ad blindness for regular users. There are simple javascripts for this.

All in all the homepage looks good. The single blog post pages may need some changes though. Below is a current blog post page with the ad positions highlighted.

We already discussed spot 1 so lets move on to position 2.

Ad position2 is position very well again. Right in the spot the user will start to read the blog pos. Styling is Googles standard though and this might need to be changed to attract a bit more attention. Also because there is some space to the right of this ad an image right left to it may be a good idea. This will attract more attention and together with the new styling this ad will probably be clicked more often.

Ad position 3 is a custom search box and also has good placing. Halfway through the article a user might want different info and this search box offers this perfectly. The search results show quite a lot of ads and this may generate some good income. I would need to hear from the websites owner if this is true though!

Also a new ad has been placed next to the logo on the top. This might be a little too invasive and throw of this nice design, but one could experiment with it. It could fit quite nicely. A white background on this one would make it less invasive.

The final setup would look like this. Also notice the new styling on spot 1 if he chooses to still have an ad here after the warning…

Also this site does not provide ads at the bottom of the posts or at the bottom of the comments. Quite often a user will read a blog post and then needs to decide where to go next. A 468×60 text ad ad those spots may be a good idea. This site has enough content to not be overloaded with 3 or more ads, so I think this is  a good idea.

This is the final page set-up as suggested by me:

I would love to know if this works out so please let us know what you changed and if tha increased the CTR!