Google Adsense Heatmap
Certain locations tend to be more successful than others. This “heat map” illustrates these ideal placements on a sample page layout. The colors fade from dark orange (strongest performance) to light yellow (weakest performance). All other things being equal, ad placements above the fold tend to perform better than those below the fold. Ads placed near rich content and navigational aids usually do well because users are focused on those areas of a page.
While this heat map is useful as a positioning guideline, we strongly recommend putting your users first when deciding on ad placement. Think about their behavior on different pages, and what will be most useful and visible to them. You’ll find that the most optimal ad position isn’t always what you expect on certain pages… more
The next thing you should consider is placing your ad in the “hottest” spot of them all — the middle of the page above the fold… more
August 9th, 2006 at 2:05 pm
[…] 1. In spite of what many (like Fernando above) would describe as growing “click cynicism”, Adsense publishers (of which Myspace will now become a monster) are doing rather radical things with their ads… at Google’s urging, of course. The line between ad and page content is disappearing. Google argues that the “context awareness” of Adsense ads qualifies them to be considered valuable content in their own right. You can see from this Adsense Heatmap, that Google wnats their ads to occupy the most important real estate on the page. Publishers who devisse clever integration schemes for ads and content will be amply rewarded. I look forward to seeing what Myspace comes up with. […]