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Positioning your Adsense Ads II

Posted By Darren Rowse 3rd of March 2005 Adsense 0 Comments

Once again the response to my post yesterday to Positioning your Adsense Ads has been quite amazing as people have emailed and left comments asking for further details of what the ‘secret position’ is to place ads on a blog that will magically double earnings overnight.

Perhaps I’ve created a monster in the past week or so here in telling people how much I earn. Since then I’ve been quite overwhelmed by the attention – emails, comments, instant messaging – all on levels I’ve not experienced before from a post. I guess people want to make money from their blogs! I can’t blame them I guess – I’m obviously interested in that too.

So what is the magical, secret position to put your Adsense ads? Someone even emailed me tonight offering to pay me to reveal the secret. Hmmmm – maybe i should hold an Ebay auction and offer the information to the highest bidder!

No – I’m a nice guy – you can send cash if you want to but I’m not into secrets and am always (well usually) happy to share what I know. The ‘secret’ was simply to move my ads down from the banner position into the actual post itself. At the time Adsense only allowed one ad placement per page, these days they allow three (like I have on my blog here) – so now you can actually keep your banner ad and also put one inside your content.

So why do ‘in content’ ads work better? The answer is pretty obvious – in fact its quite literally staring you in the face as you read this…..you’re reading this….your eyes are trained upon the content of this post. What better place to put ads than the place your reader is pretty likely to look? Now keep in mind that different websites and blogs tend to have different results when it comes to where their readers eyes are drawn to (see this fascinating blog for some studies on this) but it is generally accepted that the first paragraph of content is generally reasonably well read of most pages.

Of course there are some who argue that this isn’t an ethical thing to do – putting text link ads into the content of a blog – I’m not going to get into that argument here except to say that in my opinion blog readers are usually smart enough to tell what is content and what is an ad (the Ads by Goooogle lable is enough for me). All I’m saying here is that in my opinion and experience, the positions that generally get the highest click-throughs are within the main body and content of your blog.

I’m not really telling a massive secret here – if you look at most of the top earning blogs out there you’ll find that most of us are using the same strategy with our ad placements. There are slight variation on the theme between us but check out some of these blogs use of ads within content and you should see what I mean:

  • Engadget – ads placed after a post and before comments on individual pages and between posts on the main page.
  • Digital Photography Blog – ads here are within content at the top of posts. Another ad can be found at the bottom of posts before comments.
  • Mobile Tracker – ads at the end of posts and before comments on individual pages and between posts on the main page.
  • Gizmodo – ad at the base of each quote on individual pages and between posts on the main page.

Of course they are all variations on a theme but there is a pretty common theme there i think.

I will say this however – not all blogs are the same and each one of my blogs vary in degree to which they prove this point. Sometimes the click through rates between blogs vary incredibly despite the fact that the ads are in exactly the same position. Obviously its not as simple as just sticking an ad into the content of your blog – its worth experimenting and tracking your results. What works on one blog will not always work on another.

In my next post on this topic I’ll answer the question – ‘can you have too many adsense ads on a post?’ and ‘when does more actually = less?’

Read part 3 in this series

About Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Comments
  1. Google should do massive testing with the eye tool thing and tell us where to put ads, it will benefit everyone… even if Darren just revealed the obvious place…
    So who will be the first blogger to get millionaire thanks to his blog ? (Dave and Adam, you can’t participate sorry)

  2. This post finally motivated me to get off my ass and experiment a bit with my Adsense positioning. I’ve been doing moderately well, but there’s always room for improvement right?

    So I’m making some major changes to the Adsense placement on my longest running (and thus busiest) blog. It will be interesting to see how the introduction of in-post ads affects things.

    I’m expecting an initial drop in clicks as I’ve dropped one of my larger Adsense boxes to allow for the in-post boxes and it will take a while to get enough in-post ads in place. On the other hand I may see an increase in CPM as the in-post ads are smaller, but hopefully more visible to my visitors.

    We shall see.

  3. I made a change based on you post and have seen an immediate effect for the better.

    This causes me to rethink the fundamental layout of a commercial blog — specifcally, optimal section widths to accomodate ads.

    I may reskin my blog to test this hypothesis.

    First, I’ll leave the changes for at least a month to gather sufficient data for comparison.

  4. “Google should do massive testing with the eye tool thing…”

    Ironically, Eyetools is planning on collecting data starting on Monday about this topic, though not with Google, and will probably offer it as a mini-report (for very little money). I’m hoping that people will find this of value.

    -Greg, from Eyetools ([email protected])

  5. I moved my Adsense ads to the upper right corner of my blog and it had an immediate effect on my adsense revenues. Basically now I’m getting some!

  6. Hi!

    Is it possible to do this thing in Blogger?

  7. […] Positioning your Adsense Ads I Positioning your Adsense Ads II Positioning your Adsense Ads III […]

  8. Derek says: 06/11/2006 at 5:46 am

    Thanks, I really love reading this blog!

    I see you use wordpress as I do. Do you just insert the html code into the post?

  9. […] One particular article to check out from Darren is this one, about techniques for placing Adsense adverts in your blog. […]

  10. […] PayPerPost means Sacrificing Key Real Estate “The ’secret’ was simply to move my ads down from the banner position into the actual post…  Darren Rowse of […]

  11. […] part 2 and part 3 in this […]

  12. The most effective ads placement for me is placing the ads before and after the post. But Still, I’m looking for the smart placement for the search box.
    Darren, If possible look at my blog and suggest me to where to place the ads and the search box.
    Mohit

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