Just don't seem to make money with Adsense on this site

Hello Robo,

There are several things that come to mind about your poor CTR after reviewing your site. I saw ads for the following appear

• Top 5 Cloud Computing See Our List Of The Top 5 Consumer- Rated Cloud Computing Providers! K7Cloud.com
• Nasuni Cloud Servers: Nasuni is the secure way to use the cloud of your choice. Free trial
  Nasuni.com/Cloud_System
  
• Samsung k-12 technology: Samsung Introduces New Classroom Products. The Future Of Education!
  

To get high CTR, you need to drive targeting buying traffic to your site. I imagine that someone who is coming to your site is not targeted to the above ads. Also, your traffic may not be buying traffic.

Also, the ads themselves are not placed in the generally accepted best positions. For reference, look for a website heatmap. You will find that the top left is the "hottest" spot on a webpage, and is where website visitors will first look when they view your site. You do have a small skyscraper block close to this position. I would test a different theme, that allowed you to move this block more to the upper left. I would also test a wider block here to see if there is improvement.

You also have an ad block on the bottom right. This is the worst location to place it. Also, it is only visible on your home page. My preference is to place an ad block underneath the category navigation bar on the top. I generally see high click through rates in this location, though PPC tends to be lower. All a trade off to see what works best for your site.

While I have been writing this post, I have also been reviewing your site, and a couple of other things jump out to me too. In regards to the ad blocks, you are wasting a precious opportunity by only including a single skyscraper ad on the post pages. Try to include a block within the article yourself. This is a dramatic way to increase clicks.

And finally, the biggest thing that comes to mind is that most of your traffic is likely bot driven or is traffic looking for blog comment backlinks. In the print your photos article, you have 5 comments. To my eye, all five comments are what I would consider link spam. 2/5 look to have been placed manually, where the poster at least read through your article for the comment. THe other 3 were most likely placed by auto backlinking software. This could be a major reason you are seeing poor CTR's. It is hard to get a high CTR when alot of your traffic is just coming to your site to build links.

Try changing to image ads for a while and see how it works out.

I don't think anybody said that image and text ads will get you a higher ctr. I think I know which thread you are talking about...and the discussion was that it increased his cost per click (cpc)...what it seems you need right now is a higher click through rate so changing to image only ads could really help you.

The problem is not with the site. It's with the niche. Tech sites don't convert well with adsense. (I know because I used to have one).

Analytics will be able to answer you on this.

Look at the keywords in your Analytics. If they're mostly informational (eg. 'how to fix abc', 'will steve jobs resign' etc.) They're most likely college kids looking for information.

Also looking at the fackbook fans, it seems to most of the audiance is from India. (again, analytics will tell this is right or not). To get better clicks, you need traffic from 'buying' countries.

To fix this:
Target product or service related keywords that buyers use. Think of terms that are searched by CEOs, Purchasing managers etc.

And image ads - they don't get high CTR. They get high CPC. Try text only ads for a while, and try blend-in/contrasting ad colors.

I would advise using the "Competitive Ad Filter" I use this at least once a week on my main 3 sites, eliminate any ad urls that are nothing to do with your content - such as the "Peppa Pig World"(It's a new kids attraction near me) ads that were showing when I visited. I do find this helps.

Part of the other problem is that whilst your site is very good - look & content, you discuss a lot of different topics and hence this will cause the adsense bot to be confused as to what ads to service you with, and this almost certainly at the heart of the issue (An example would be a blog solely on heart disease would be likely to pull up more targetted ads, as a result of a more specific subject base). The only thing I could suggest would be using the ad filter, and upping the keyword ratio in each article, which should help.

Try the filter first as it's free to use and is good practice to do so, although not widely used it really will up the CTR when used regularly to eliminate the junk.
hope this helps you and others

You got all the answers, but I must admit your blog is great. I like your design

I've noticed that one of my sites can get some pretty decent traffic but I can't seem to be able to get clicks. The niche can also determine the kind of CTR you're getting so always keep that in mind.

have you tried changing the ads to text only because what i see is image..test out the conversion..