Studies have shown that ad positioning is crucial to content revenue generation. Positioning means the physical position of an ad on a web page, the size of the ad, and also which page(s) on a site carries an ad.
"As I explain in Chapter 8, when using a program like Google's AdSense, you'll want to use AdSense to generate code that displays ads sized to your site and also in colors that work with your site."
Although there are some general guidelines for what works best with advertising positioning, it is far more art than science. You should expect to spend a fair amount of time tweaking ad position to see what works best another good reason for having a site mechanism in place that allows you to change ad settings globally by editing one include file.
Tweaking ads is good for another reason: you don't want ad fatigue to set in. Ad fatigue is a term used by webmasters to describe the phenomenon in which visitors to your site are so used to the ad display on your site that they ignore it. Experimenting with new ad positioning (and colors) is a good way to combat that "same old, same old" ad feeling and avoid ad fatigue.
Most studies show that ads positioned above the fold do better than ads lower on a page. Above the fold means visible without scrolling. The smaller the monitor, and the lower its resolution, the less screen real estate there is above the fold. In other words, a monitor running at 640 x 480 pixels screen resolution has a lot less available real estate above the fold than a monitor running at 800 x 600, which in turn has much less area above the fold than a monitor running at higher resolution.
If you want the maximum eye ball sand you should, because more eyeballs means more advertising revenue you should try to place ads so that they will be above the fold on lower-resolution monitors. It certainly makes sense to target 800 x 600 monitor resolution, because this is widely in use. Don't finalize your ad positioning and web site and page design without checking it out on an 800 x 600 monitor.
Some research has shown the vertical ad blocks the kind Google calls skyscrapers work better than horizontal ads . However, from the viewpoint of basic geometry, it is easier to fit a horizontal ad block above the fold than a vertical skyscraper: the lower part of the skyscraper is likely to be below the fold. So if you decide to go with vertical ad blocks, make sure they are positioned as high as possible and that at least one ad (assuming the skyscraper contains multiple contextual ads) is positioned above the fold.
One other major positioning issue is context. From the viewpoint of a content publisher, you'd like to position ads so they are not only contextually relevant but also lead to a high click-through rate.
"With programs like Google's AdSense, context is important because you want a high click-through rate. With affiliate advertising, context is even more important because you don't make any money without a conversion, which means turning someone into a customer. You may, perhaps, care less about context when you are paid by the impression. In that case all you really care about is that the ad gets seen on your site."
Google's AdSense attempts to place only contextually relevant ads. With some notable lapses, AdSense is pretty successful at this. In any case, you can't exercise a great deal of control over the ads that AdSense displays on your siteyou have to trust that Google gets this right..
"You can forbid your competitor's ads from appearing on your site by using the AdSense option that allows you to ban specific IP addresses. The ability to ban IP addresses can be used to a limited degree to also keep out advertisers you find offensive. For example, an animal rights information site might want to ban ads from prominent furriers."
There are some important aspects of context that you can control, although there is no reliable analytic research about what works best. Some sites use graphics and positioning to make contextual ads blend in with the site and appear almost part of the editorial content. Other sites feel that keeping the appearance of editorial integrity is vitally important and so use color and position to instantly indicate that the ads are separate from the body of the content.
Overloading pages with ads generally does not work because viewers tend to ignore pages that have too many ads. If you're working with multiple ad programs and kinds of ads to generate a revenue stream, you can make an important contribution to ad context by deciding what kind of ad should go with what content. For example, it might make sense to advertise books on Amazon on a page of book reviews.
There's also a school of thought that believes ads should only be placed on "boring" pages for example, registration pages, login pages, resource pages, exit pages. (An exit page is a page designed to launch a visitor onward following a visit, for example, an order confirmation.) One reason for placing click-through ads on resource and exit pages is that visitors will be leaving your site anyhow from these pages. You won't be losing traffic by providing click-through opportunities.
The more general logic for placing ads only on boring pages is that it gives your site a clean, inviting, ad-free look and that visitors are more likely to click on ads in the context of boredom than in the context of exciting content.
Whatever strategy you decide to try, if you will be varying ad programs depending on context, you should attempt to implement this programmatically rather than by manually adding and deleting advertising code from individual HTML pages.
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