Over the last few weeks I’ve introduced Google AdSense onto this site. I’m not expecting to earn vast amounts of money from these ads, it’s more of an experiment at the moment so see how much income AdSense can generate. I’ve only had the ads up and running for a couple of weeks and I have a lot to learn in this area, but one thing that I’ve noticed very quickly is that positioning your ads makes a huge difference.
I currently have banner ads placed at the top and bottom of each blog post, plus a skyscraper ad out in the sidebar. So far I’ve had most success with ads placed in the actual body of the blog post. The top of the post seems the most popular, followed not far behind by ads placed at the bottom of the post.
This makes sense when you think about it. When someone visits a web site they tend to focus on the main body of the blog post, rather than other information you may have in your sidebar. So far the ads placed in my sidebar have received hardly any clicks whatsoever, in fact they are probably a waste of real estate on my sidebar and I may remove them if things don’t change.
There is certainly evidence to support that ads placed in the main body of the post will be the most successful. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen published an article on how the human eye scans over a week page. It’s a fascinating read and well worth a look.
To summarize his findings, readers tend to focus on the main content of a web page, rather than peripheral information that is tucked away in a sidebar. Therefore, if you want to grab your readers attention with Google Ads then focus on the main content of your blog post.
This is backed up further by Darren Rowse over at Pro Blogger. He comes to the same conclusion on positioning AdSense ads. Darren also mentions how placing too many ads on your site can actually lead to worse results. Depending on the internal structure of the web page, Google may allocate ads to you sidebar before the main content of your blog post. This can result in your sidebar stealing potentially the most lucrative ads from appearing where they’re most needed - in the main body of the blog post.
I’d love to hear how others have fared in this field. If you’ve got any tips your willing to share then let me know.
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3 responses so far ↓
1 WordPress: MySQL Search and Replace using PHPMyAdmin | The Marketing Technology Blog // May 14, 2007 at 11:33 am
[...] your advertisement within the body of a post can result in a dramatic increase in revenue. Dean is working on his as [...]
2 Rick Cockrum // May 14, 2007 at 7:46 pm
Banner ads and sidebar ads haven’t done well for me. The most productive ads have been in-post (180 or 250 wide), after the post and before the comments (336 wide), and link ads at the top of the page.
Ads on archive pages and individual posts also tend to do better than ads on the index page. I’ve assumed that is because my regular readers who have me bookmarked go to the index page, while people looking for specific information, such as arrive after a search, go to the archives and individual post pages. The latter are much more likely to click an ad.
3 Dean // May 15, 2007 at 7:22 am
Thanks for the information. It sounds like I’ve got a bit of experimenting to do. I’ll wait until I’ve got a months worth of revenue data from my current ads placing, then I’ll try some of the ideas you suggested.
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