Increase CTR using Ad Placement
In addition to choosing the right ad format and adequate colours, placing your ads in the right places of the page can impact positively your performances.
The basic issue in placing ads on a page is as follow : where should I place my ads to get maximum performance ? The answer is : Place them where people will see them and therefor click on them !
Can't figure out what people look at when viewing your pages ? Just ask yourself : How many people will read through the article in comparision with those who will see my website's footer ? Then it becoms obvious that there is way more probability that and ad unit placed on the left hand menu or in the text will be seen by more people.
To help you think about this issue, Google has posted some time ago this very usefull "performance map" :
The colours are simple to understand : if the colour is orange or red, then this place is a premium one (high CTR). If the colour is yellow or even white, this means you shouldn't place your ads in such places unless you have no other choices.
As you can notice, this map is logical and anyone can figure it out just by thinking it over a little bit ! In fact, a visitor expects the uper part of the left hand menu (bellow the navigation bar) to contain links to the different senctions of the website, so it is normal that your visitors look there. On the opposite, very few websites place their navigation links on the right hand menu and these are generally dedicated to adverts which causes people to naturally avoid looking there.
Concerning the primary content area, this is the place all visitors will see if they want to read your content. In addition English sites and most other languages are writtent from left to right so it is natural that the units on the right are seen more often. The opposite is therefor true for a website written in arabic (which you read from right to left).
Our personal testing and experiments show that this map coincides with the reality in most cases, so this is a good starting point in ad placement optimisation. Now that you have the basics, let's look at some more specific issues.
Though this illustration can be applied as it is to the majority of websites, not all websites have a three column layout, not all sites have textual content, not all websites have a navigation bar...
