Adsense - Basic Ad Placement

One of the most important aspects of running an Google AdSense campaign on your pages is getting the advertisements noticed by your visitors. Here we'll discuss the basics of good ad placement.

One well known fact by most webmasters is that ads placed above the fold performs very well. In case you don't know that the "fold" means, imagine that you fold your monitor in half horizontally. The area above that fold is where ads perform best (in general). This area is illustrated in figure 1.

However this is of course a rule of thumb and does not apply to all cases.

Each and every site will have different locations within their pages that perform better than others. What you must do constantly is to:

1. Place Ad
2. Test/Track Ad (Using channels)
3. Change
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 over and over

This simple optimization technique is very simple but yet not carried out by all webmasters. Badly placed advertisements will yield very low Click Through Rates (CTR). Just think about it. You have a site with great content, good traffic but a CTR of 1%. With optimization you could increase the CTR to 3~5% which would mean a 3~5 fold increase in your revenue.

Anyway enough about that as all that will be covered later.

A useful page to visit when you are starting off is provided by Google. Have a look at this page for some advice from Google on AdSense Optimization.

As you can see from their "heat map" most of the locations that perform well are above the fold and to the left of the page. Again this is just a generic view of ad placement but it's a good starting point.

Successful AdSense placement also requires you to step into the shoes of your visitor. For example, if you have a page which is one long article an advert placed right at the end of the article may be a good idea (especially if you have little other navigation links at the bottom of your page. This is because the visitor will finish reading the article and then is presented with the ads when they are wondering "what next?". It's a great way of getting them to notice your advert and therefore increase the likelihood of them clicking on your ad.