Some people think your goal as a maximum revenue-seeking publisher is to squeeze the largest possible ad units into your page. The reasoning must go: the larger the ad unit, the more likely visitors will see them (and click on them).

The reasoning is perfectly sound, but sometimes testing reaches a different conclusion.

In this test on HubPages, the larger banner performed significantly better than the smaller one in the header region. However, both in the sidebar and in the footer, smaller ad units performed better.

Just goes to show you – unless you test, you won’t know which ad unit performs best within the ad regions of your pages.

Attention! Paul Edmondson, CEO of YieldBuild, will be speaking at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, Thursday, April 24, at 11 am: Maximizing Ad Revenue Through Format Optimization. Be sure to mark your calendars!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 3:06 pm and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.