Believe it or not, ad placement on your website can make a big difference to your money making ability. Just as advertising quantity is important and if there are too many ads, you’ll turn people off, having the ads in the wrong place will also reduce your chances of making money online. Keep ads above the fold and in view for people on the site.
The Importance of Ad Placement
Whether you have a content site or a blog, if you’re using advertising like Adsense, banner
s from Commission Junction or PepperJam or another affiliate program, placement is important. If you can imagine where the reader’s eyes will go when they read your article, that’s where the ads need to be.
So, if you’re writing blogs to make ad revenue, you’ll want the ads near the entry that the reader is looking at. Don’t put the ads all the way out of the way at the bottom of the page. Beside, above or directly below the text the user is reading can work the best. Blending your ads in with your website colours is also helpful because the ads look natural.
Experiment with the placement of the ads until you start to see results. It may take a few experiments to find the perfect blend and remember, the best way to get someone interested in clicking an ad is to leave enough to the imagination in your content that the user is bound to click the related ad looking for more info.
About Sean Rasmussen
Hi Sean,
I’ve always thought that having my ads at the top of my site is the best, which I guess is above the fold. But, I didn’t think about considering where the reader’s eyes will go as they scan the page and then put the ads there. This is a great tip.
Could I use Google Analytics to check which areas readers click on the most; on a particular page, and use this as a guide for where to put my ads?
Hi Jazz,
I think that GA has a feature available where you can see where visitors have clicked. I did try to use this, however it did not really work for me. Not sure if it was a beta version or not.
I’ll take a look and reply back if I can find something.
In Google Analytics > Content > Site Overlay
This should open up a new window of your website/blog and display a percentage value of where visitors have clicked.
Not sure whether it will show things like adsense (as I haven’t got it running on my site at the moment), however you should be able to get that from the adsense section of GA if you have linked your adsense account to GA.
Hi Cemil,
Thanks for letting me know. I really appreciate the help. I checked it out and it does show the percentages wherever a visitor has clicked on the page. It’s very helpful and it’s an interesting look at what visitors will actually click on. Totally changes the way I look at my site.
I personally like to be able to distinguish ads from text, otherwise I feel a bit cheated. Therefore this is the way I have my ads as well. Nice put clearly showing as being ads.
Sean
Great tips.
I recently asked some friends to review my site and give me some feedback. I got some great information from this and your tips will compliment it.
Hi Sean
I realise that the placement of ads on a page is very important and isn’t just hit and miss. There is a real science and psychology as to how the eye moves across the page. I am not really sure what the whole psychology is but I do know that as the eye (in the western world text placement) moves from left to right, ads are better placed on the right hand side in the upper part of the page as that is where they eye will come to rest when it has read across a line.
I also like the pointer about blending your adds in with the website colour to make it look more natural. Food for thought and definitely worth doing.
Hi Elly,
That makes a lot of sense. Of course that’s the way our eyes look at a page because it’s the way we read. No wonder Google has all the sponsored listings along the top and down the right hand side.
Although when I looked at Don’s link below, the Google Adsense heat map seems to suggest the opposite. So, maybe we need to use Google Analytics and look at where readers are actually clicking on our sites.
One of the reasons for placing a menu (nav bar) on the left is because the eye moves from left to right. The Google spiders also apparently do the same.
The heat map Don gives the URL for suggests that the left is a better spot than the right – and interestingly, also the bottom is good (!)
One reason for having the ads on the left – is that people who scan your page see them first, subconsciously know they are there, and if your content doesn’t give them what they are looking for, they will remmeber the ads and perhaps click on them to seek info elsewhere.
This is good if you want adsense revenue! And, if that is the primary purpose of the page (adsense revenue) then you really don’t want the content to give all the answers. You would prefer them to click an ad!
It is, as Google says, denedent on what you think the visitors are after – as well as your aim.
Google Adsense has a “heat map” that illustrates the effectiveness of various locations for placing ads. https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=17954
Thanks for that link Don – was both interesting and helpful.
Depending on what a page and content is for, it will pay to do some experimentation on ad placement as Sean recommends.
Thanks Don for that link from Google – they actually have a lot of useful information (like Sean’s blog) which you don’t know exists!
Hi Don
Thank you for the link and I would encourage anyone visiting this page to copy and paste the URL that Don has given us as it is a wonderful resource to keep on file or print out and stick on your wall or magnet board.
Cool link Don…you are a man of many talents…just out of curiositry what is your main interest’s online? You seem very “upwith it” on google m/
Hi Jody. What are my main interest’s online? Now that’s a hard question to answer briefly. I guess I could say my interests are wide ranging. The reason I joined Sean’s “Learn And Earn” is because I’m interested in the strategies and tactics of Internet Marketing. One of the reasons for that interest is that I try to help a number of organizations (charity, peace, etc) and a few clients as well, market their “products”.
And of course, I’ve have to get Grateful We’re Not Dead out there in front of the world. Still waiting for Australian friends to win the lottery and finance the band’s Great Australian Tour to some local corner pub in Bathurst.
I accept that analysis and will apply the analysis with my placement – but I would have thought people would read through your article and either get through a paragraph or 2, get bored or find it isnt relevant so want to go – which would be a good place for an ad, or would get to the bottom of your articles, and being lazy would not scroll back to the top for an obvious ad link – so at the bottom would be a good place.
Sean answered the question a few posts back which was great! With the flexibility of being able to have 3 adsense blocks on your page you have the flexibility to plae them at the top and the bottom (and in a 3rd place as well!)