AdSense Tip #4: AdSense Positioning
So far we’ve looked at choosing ad formats and ad colors. Today we are going to look at ad positioning. Where on the page you place your ads can dramatically affect your earnings.
Above the Fold
“Above the Fold” is a term from the newspaper industry. When folded newspapers are on the newsstand, only the top half of the page is displayed. The most important headlines are put “above the fold” so that they can be seen without turning the newspaper over. The Web industry has adopted this term to refer to anything on the page that can be seen without scrolling down. Anything you want visitors to your web site to see should go above the fold.
If your ads are currently at the bottom of the page, and users need to scroll down to see the ads, you can see dramatic improvements by moving the ads to the top of the page. This is probably the best thing you can do if you want to increase your AdSense revenue. In a comment to an earlier post in this blog, John Henshaw reported a 500% increase by moving his ads up to the top part of the page.
Where do users focus?
Another way to get users to see your ads is by placing them where the users focus naturally on the page. The trick is to find out where that is. Some help may come from studies such as the Stanford Poynter Project on eyetracking. This study gives details of where users look on a page and what order they look at them. Another similar but simpler form of this is the Google Heat Map that I blogged about earlier. The key thing to realize is that different areas of the page are viewed more often than others, and can lead to more clicks on your ads.
How your ads are placed on the page in relation to other elements on the page also have an effect on how often they are noticed. AdSense publishers have reported good results by placing ads beside key elements such as navigation elements or graphics. A useful forum thread at Digital Point discusses the technique of using images beside ads. Another common technique is to place ads in the middle of content blocks.
Of course, each web site is unique so what works on one site may not work on another. As I’ve mentioned in the past, these tips should be used as starting points for your own experimentation.
