Ad placement

The best location to place ads is wherever the web site visitor will be looking.

Open up your web page. Where on the page does your eye immediately focus? Place an ad there.

The best performing ads seem to be ads which are inline with content. However, it can be very challenging to place inline ads across entire web sites.

Placing ads across an entire web site is usually accomplished with Shared HTML (shtml) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This effectively limits ads to appearing in the same locations across a wide range of web pages.

Ads On the Top of the Page

Ads in the page header perform moderately well. The location is a good one to catch a visitors eye. However, many web users have developed a condition known as "ad blindness" where their brains automatically skip over advertisements.

One technique to reduce ad blindness is to place the advertisement below the page header and as far into the content space as possible. If your content space can be divided into multiple sections, this may work well for you.

Ads On the Bottom of the Page

Ads at the bottom of the page perform poorly. Web site visitors tend to read a page from the top down, and may never reach the bottom of the page. In addition, web site visitors have many different browser sizes, which may cause them to never see the advertisement unless they scroll down to it.

Ads On the Right Side of the Page

Ads on the right side of the page perform moderately well, and are currently in vogue. They appear to perform slightly better than ads on the top of the page at the current time, most likely due to better resilience to ad blindess.

When using ads on the right side of the page, it is important to test your web page at several different screen resolutions in several different web browers. Your web pages should automatically resize to ensure that the advertisements do not scroll outside of the browser window or get "bumped" down below the content.

Internet Explorer appears to have a bug which can cause right side ads to be "bumped" down below the content if the total width of all sections of the web page is equal to 100%. To work around this bug, ensure that the total width of your web page is 96% or less.

Ads On the Left Side of the Page

Ads on the left side of the page may perform the best. The left side of the page is normally reserved for the web site menu. This means that users frequently look to the left side of the page.

The difficulty is determining where to place your web site menu when the left side of the page is no longer available to you. A top menu might work for you, depending upon the design and content of your web site. Placing your menu on the right side of the page is another option, but one that may confuse some web site visitors.

If Google allows more than one ad unit per page in the future, the left side of the page might become an excellent location for a single ad, either above or below the menu.

Ad Color

Many webmasters report that brightly colored ads which contrast sharply with the color scheme of the rest of the web page return excellent results for them.

My experience has been that ads which mimic the look and feel of the rest of my web page return the best results. This is most likely because the Google AdSense ads closely relate to the topic of the page and therefore appear to the visitor as additional content.

Ad Unit Style

The Google AdSense programs offers a wide variety of ad unit styles and sizes. The ad unit styles include:

Ad Unit	Dimensions
Leaderboard	728x90
Banner	486x60
Half Banner	234x60
Button	125x125
Skyscraper	120x600
Wide Skyscraper	160x600
Medium Rectangle	300x250
Large Rectangle	336x280
Small Rectangle	180x150
Square	250x250

Leaderboard and Banner ad units are obvious choices to placement in page headers and footers. Leaderboards are preferable, because they are able to show more ads. Banners are a classic web format, and may be necessary where the width of your available space is limited.

Skyscrapers are an excellent choice for advertisements, because they appear to be less vulnerable to ad blindness than the horizontal ad formats. Google recently added the wide skyscraper format. This new ad unit displays one more ad than the classic 120x600 skyscraper unit. If you are currently using the 120x600 skyscrapers, switching to the new wide skyscraper format may increase your revenue from the Google AdSense program.

Rectangles, Squares, and Buttons are best used when placed inside a content area. This makes rectangles more difficult to place, but also gives then the best revenue potential.

Total Number of Links

Reducing the total number of links on your content pages can increase revenue from AdSense by reducing the options for a visitor.

If your web page has fifteen links and one AdSense wide skyscraper on it, the visitor has a total of twenty options for leaving your page without closing the browser window.

This means that, if the user clicks on a link, the random odds that the visitor will click on an AdSense link are 5 in 20.

If you reduce the number of other links on the page to 5, the total number of options presented to the user is now 10. This means that the random odds of a user selecting an AdSense ad are now 5 in 10.

Another option, but one which may annoy your web site visitors, is to open all external links in a new window. This will leave your page open in the users browser, giving them another opportunity to click on an AdSense link. This can be done by adding target="_new" to your HTML links, or by converting your outbound links to JavaScript.

It should be noted that Google AdSense never opens ads in a new window.

Test, Test and Test Again

Testing is the key to increasing your CTR percentages. Change your ad colors, wait a week and look at the stats. Do the same with different ad units and different ad placement.