Continuing our series on advice on how to optimize your AdSense ad units, we’re going over AdSense placement techniques in this blog post (last week I covered AdSense formatting).

Rule #1: Put your ads above the fold

What this means is that your ads should be visible when you first load your page, before the visitor needs to scroll downward. Although ads below the fold can perform well, it’s a trickier proposition and requires testing to get it right –the footer spot, in particular, is among the hardest to monetize, and usually requires constant changes to the format in order to perform consistently (that’s what YieldBuild tends to do for our clients’ sites).

As I mentioned in the AdSense formatting post, be sure to pick the three most popular AdSense sizes: the 300×250, the 160×600 and the 728×90. More and more publishers are organizing their templates to accommodate these 3 sizes. In organizing your template layout, keep in mind….

Rule #2: The L

Ad units that adjoin each other tend to do well, in a format called “the L”. They should run perpendicular to each other and sit very closely to each other, as they do in these examples:

Rule #3: Ads should be close to click activity

Look at the places on your page where users click, where they interact with your site: navigation; share buttons; next page; etc. Place ad units near them. Don’t make your visitors have to drag their eyes and mice to regions of your page where they wouldn’t go normally, to look at ads…because they won’t.

Rule #4: Embed ads in content

This is relatively easy to do with the popular and versatile 300×250 ad unit. Embed this unit to the right or left of your content. And, blend the ad unit with the page background when it’s above the fold, and use highly-contrasting colors against your background for units below the fold.

Rule #5: Make your ad unit layout match your template

This might go without saying, but the precise placement of your AdSense ad units should make for a clean look on your site. Visually jarring ads or ones that don’t blend in aesthetically with your site with respect to their placement will often not perform well (although there are exceptions, but you would need YieldBuild or testing to find those out).

Many thanks to Chris Gathright for contributing to this article.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 5:53 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.