Yoni Baciu, one of YieldBuild’s engineers, has overlaid imprints of 20,000 ads randomly selected from the Web’s top 100,000 Websites (by traffic) on one blank slate. The result is YieldBuild Lab’s Heat Map which renders the most popularly-selected positions on a Web page with a brighter red glow.

What does the Heat Map tell us?

First, header position ads, and sidebar ads (particularly on the right side), are popular, and ad density also decreases as you go down the page. The darkest portions of the Heat Map are to lower-left.

This is not to say that this a protocol for placing ads if you want to maximize performance. Generally, ads should be within a users’ line of sight, close to navigation elements, and embedded in read content. But site-specific recommendations are usually the result of careful testing (or implementation of YieldBuild, which finds the best-performing regions for each page algorithmically).

Interesting, Google’s own recommendations for AdSense publishers suggest heavier weighting towards the top of content (although not necessarily the header) and also favoring the left more than the right.

If Google’s recommendations for AdSense publishers prove to be generally true for publishers using other networks as well, then that darker-red zone to the middle-left probably presents some opportunity to increase revenue, although without YieldBuild or testing, there’s no way for a publisher to know.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 at 5:54 pm and is filed under YieldBuild Lab. 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.