Mikael Rieck is the author of more than hundred articles on topics of how to make money both online and offline. He has been online since 1999 and has always had a passion for money making opportunities and teaching others how to make a profit.How to Find the Best Adsense Ad Placement
This is the second post in my series on Making Money on the Internet with Adsense. The series of posts about Adsense will help you increase your income by making small changes that might seem insignificant but which can have a huge impact in your profits. In one of the comments Chris explained how he had made a little change to an old website and because of this change he increased his CTR with 1%.
I don’t know what Chris’ CTR was prior to the change but if we assume that he had an average CTR of 5% then and increase of 1% from 5% to 6% would be the equivalent of a 20% increase in profit. And all from a little change he made.
In my previous post I talked about the importance of having a web design that isn’t pretty because “good looks” will often keep readers more interested in the design instead of the ads and if you want to make money by having people click your ads then you definitely don’t want a pretty site for them to be distracted by. For more information about why an ugly site is better be sure to check out Making Money with Adsense and Ugly Web Design.
What is the best Adsense ad placement?
Besides the fact that you will want an ugly site there are several other factors that will have an effect on how often your visitors will click your ads. One of these factors is the one about the placement of the ads. You can take the exact same ad and place it on the same page but in two different locations and get two very different results.
The picture to the left (click to enlarge) shows you what is normally considered to be the best Adsense ad placement. The darker the color the more people will actually see the ad and therefore also click on it. I don’t want to go into the scientific explanation of why that is and how humans read pages because it won’t really matter to know these things.
The most important thing to do is to TEST. You should definitely start out by trying out what is most likely going to work the best but since no two sites will perform the same you can’t AND SHOULDN’T take anything for granted. Just think if Chris had taken his older site for granted and not made the changes. He would have left 20% profits on the table and he wouldn’t even know it.
So if people ask you what the best Adsense ad placement is then you should be able to tell them two things. The first is what YOUR best placement is for a particular site and you would know because you would have tested all possible options that you could think of and secondly you should tell the person asking to test on their own because you wouldn’t know unless you had tested it.
To Your Success,
Mikael
Recommended reading
More on placement – Mike gives his take on it
An actual test – I’m a sucker for case studies
Explaining blind spots – I don’t agree with everything but some valid points
10 Responses so far
Brian D. Hawkins
April 28th, 2009
11:41 am
Thanks Mikael, I’ve all but given up on AdSense lately but I’ve been considering giving it another try.
Mikael
April 28th, 2009
12:05 pm
Everything works if you work it. Adsense can become a great source of (relatively) passive income. If you’re already making money on something else then don’t let Adsense take your time away from that. Only add where you find it appropriate.
Jumping from one thing to the next rarely helps in the short run.
And thank you for commenting. Please come back again soon.
Mikael
Chris
April 28th, 2009
3:32 pm
Cheers for the mention Mikael.
On my site I have about a 3/4% CTR, which kinda sucks considering I have the exact placement mentioned on adsensemasterplan. I think people generally know what they are looking for when they come to the site.
I am, however, currently toying with the idea of a self learning adsense placement system. That basically tries new placements and records the CTR and eCPM. It’d probably take a few months to work, but would eventually give you the best return for your design.
Sire
April 29th, 2009
1:48 pm
Testing is really important, but you have to give it a bit of time to get an accurate result. Changing the placement daily may not be such a good idea as it will not give you a truly accurate result. I reckon perhaps a weekly change would do the trick,
Mikael
April 29th, 2009
3:33 pm
@Sire, you’re definitely right that you will need a “significant” population to be statistically certain. I didn’t pay that much attention in class so I can’t say what is right or wrong.
Normally though it is not a matter of “time” but rather a matter of the number of visitors taking action.
e.g. you change every time you have had 100 clicks or so. That is what I would do.
Chris
April 29th, 2009
3:46 pm
Ideally you should do it over 100 days (statistically) but given how much time we are talking here, and how seasons affect the money so much I would suggest do it more like over a week or two.
You must also remember that changing the layout of the ads will initially give you a spike, so you should probably wait 1-2 days before recording results.
Mikael
April 29th, 2009
3:49 pm
@Chris, I don’t see why you would measure in a time aspect unless of cause you have huge fluctuations over time. If you get a relatively stable amount of traffic then I believe that the time aspect is irrelevant?
Chris
April 29th, 2009
4:00 pm
Sorry I got bogged down with time, what I meant was 100x sample size. But I think the smallest sample size would be over a day, simply because people goto sleep then wake up so traffic differs too much. So you’d need to figure out a sample size that is both bigger than a day, and big enough to reduce the effect of random fluctuations. You should also consider the weekends in this.
You can’t just say you are going to sample over X visitors or Y impressions, because they vary greatly with the time of the day, and day of the week.
Mikael
April 29th, 2009
4:22 pm
Great, then we’re on the same page
I agree that one day might be too little to test but on the other hand I will argue that if you test something that is radically different and you see a steep decrease over the course of that day you shouldn’t wait for several days or a week to change it back. If something clearly doesn’t work it should be instantly removed.
Sire
April 29th, 2009
10:49 pm
Yep, I agree that the time factor is relevant to the amount of visits a particular blog gets, the more hits the less time needed to get a result.
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