Smart ways to make money online - Heatmap Placement.

Besides optimizing the appearance of your Adsense ads,
There are 2 other factors that will determine your ultimate click-through rate are:

1) The type ad format you use, and

2) The positions where you place them.

Before we move on, you may want to familiarize yourself again with the different formats of ads that Google offers. Ad formats.

Google has taken results from a heat map study and placed them into a screen shot below.

Using the heat map image above, look at your website's current layout. This will allow you to place ads where users are more likely to click. However, an important aspect to remember is what your users like about your site as it is currently. By thinking about your users and how they have interacted with your website in the past, you will be able to decide where you can profitably but non-intrusively place your ads.

Certain locations tend to be more successful than others. This "heat map" illustrates the ideal placing on a sample page layout. The colors fade from dark orange (strongest performance) to light yellow (weakest performance). All other things being equal, ads located 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 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, a website which has pages of content, such as articles, may want to place ads at the bottom after the content. This will not interupt the regular user's flow over the page, and it will recieve better click through rates than elsewhere because that is where users end up when they are done read and ready to leave the page.

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