Adsense Ad Placements

This Article was adapted from Google's Adsense Help.

Certain locations tend to be more successful than others. 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, it is strongly recommend putting your users first when deciding on ad location. 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.

For example, on pages where users are typically focused on reading an article, ads placed directly below the end of the editorial content tend to perform very well. It's almost as if users finish reading and ask themselves, "What can I do next?" Precisely targeted ads can answer that question for them.

Google has also shown an adsense heatmap (see Figure below) where the "hot" spots for ads are indicated in orange and yellow for optimising your adsense placements

Personally, I have applied some of this ad placement techniques to my various blogs and found that ad placement really does affect one's earnings. Currently, I try my best to include an ad on top of my posting, below my posting and to the right hand side of my posting. I also add link words at the top of my posting. Before I read about ad placement, I earned close to nothing from clicks. After re-arranging my layout for adsense, I noticed a significant increase in the number of clicks and earnings my blogs were generating.