Understanding where to place Google Ad units on your site is an important skill in optimising Adsense ads. Strategically placed ads will has very good chance of giving good results with Adsense.

Heat map

Google provides in its Adsense optimization demo what is called a "heat map". This is basically a diagram that shows the Adsense ad placement areas and their corresponding performance possibilites. Their recommadations seems to work in majority of the cases. Here is the diagram.

A variety of size and shape ads for placing in your content are available. These can be text or image ads or both - you specify what you'll allow. Ad units are full ads. Link units are simply a strip of text links that your visitors might want to click.

Google allows you to put up to 3 Ad Units and 1 Link unit on each page of your Web site, provided you follow its policies - both for AdSense and for Webmasters.

  • Ads targetting
  • Keep the ads non-intrusive
  • Ads in the content
  • SEO Optimization

Optimizing Adsense Ad Placement

In this diagram the darker the area indicated, the better its performance will be. From this we can see the large banner that goes right above the primary content of the site has the highest chance of producing clicks. This map relies on the natural direction of readers gaze goes, namely from left to right, from top to bottom, we sustain the theory according to which the reader is inclined to grant more attention to content in these areas, being the first he lays eyes on, so the first choice for ads placement would be the top-left area of the page.

As a general rule the "top-left" area catch most of user attention and hense make good choices for Ad placement. These are usually considered the most readable sections by a normal visitor. Interestingly, we can observer from this diagram that, the section right below the primary content is also a hot area. This is because the reader assimilates the section right below the end of an article.

tool
While the heat map and tool are useful as a positioning guideline, we 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.

article
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.

browseri
Because browsers and screen sizes vary, Google also created a handy tool that allows you to enter any URL, and check whether you've implemented your ads above the fold. To use it, visit
as-abovethefold.appspot.com