Best Adsense Ad Placement Position
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
Holy ball point banana – batman, it’s 104 degrees in Chicago! I just got back from my camping/boating vacation in Arkansas where it was 108 degrees but didn’t expect to find similar heat here in the windy city! Wow, that’s all I can say.
The vacation was great, but it’s time to get back to work! I’ve got so much to do here at MarketingFool.com that I almost don’t know where to start!
Today I want to talk about something that’s pretty important to any Adsense Empire, and that’s ad placement.
Ad Placement?
Yup, ad placement…where do you put your adsense ads on each webpage in order to maximize click thru rate (ctr)? I’ve always put them right at the top of the page, first thing, right below the site header. Sort of like this:
Believe me, I’ve tested just about every ad placement position you can think of and that’s always been the best pulling spot for me.
But Then Google Went Nuts…
I’ve talked a lot about Google and how they’ve basically lost their minds lately; shuffling the search rankings beyond all reason. Come to find out, one of their ranking factors now (and apparently a pretty big one) is ad placement.
Huh?
Yeah, they’ll rank your site based on your site’s ad placement.
The reasoning is straight forward (if stupid). Basically it goes like this: “if you have ads at the top of your page, you must be a spammer with a low quality site…so we’re going to give you a bad ranking”.
I know, I know….stupid. But there you go.
But…Google Makes Money When People Click On My Ads…
…so you’d think they wouldn’t penalize you for putting the ads in the most prominent position of your site in order to garner the most clicks. But no…stupid.
So what to do? Honestly I don’t know! I’ve been testing and I still don’t have a solid solution. Here’s my latest experiment…
Right now I’m running a test with 100 new sites using the old template (above), and 100 new sites with basically the same template but with a solid paragraph above the Adsense ad so that the ad appears below the fold of the screen.
I’ll let it run for a month or two and announce the results here on the blog.
I suggest you start trying new ad placement yourself. You don’t have to do such a large test…try batches of 5 to 10 sites instead of 100 if you want.
What ad placements are working best for you? Comment below.
Keep on building!
-John Elder
The Marketing Fool!
