The Silent Avatar Speaks

If you want to generate additional income from advertising it pays to give yourself a fighting chance by knowing what type of advertisements to place and where to put them on your website.

Every website is unique, however there are certain locations which lean towards being more successful.

Google’s AdSense ad locations heatmap shows these locations, with darker orange giving the strongest performance and fading to light yellow with the weakest performance.

Looking at Google’s AdSense ad locations heatmap you will notice:

• Ads closer to the center of the page tend to perform better.
• Ads above the fold tend to perform better than those below the fold.
• Studies have also shown ads placed at the end of articles perform well, even though they’re below the fold.
• Ads placed near site navigation or by images or other rich content perform well also.

  Margaret Holland, a senior account manager at Yahoo! Publisher Network, finds that “from a click-through standpoint, most publishers get the best results when they place a ‘leaderboard’ above the fold between the top nav and their rich content.” She finds the next most effective for click-throughs is the right-hand column or margin, especially with skyscrapers and vertical banners when placed next to the content in the main body. In addition, she finds that contextual square and rectangle banner ads within the center of the body content also do well.

  The results of a poll by Yahoo! Publisher Blog via Your Ad Display Preferences dated January 26, 2007, asked where their publishers find the most successful ad placement, as shown in the chart below.

  Answer	Response (%)
  Leaderboard	27.32%
  Right rail	9.28%
  Left rail	7.88%
  Embedded in content	44.66%
  Below the fold	1.93%
  Rotating positions	4.73%
  Total	100%

  It’s most important to consider your users though, and their behavior at your specific site and with each specific page at your site.