iZachy

Interesting post on the YPN Blog. In the post, Yahoo suggests that the best placement of ads are:

1. leaderboard ad above the fold between the top nav and content area
2. skyscrapers and vertical banners in the right-hand rail or margin
3. square and rectangle ads placed within the center column (content area)

I'm surprised the click-throughs are higher on the right side than the left side for Yahoo ads. In my tests of Adsense, ads work better on the left than the right. Then again, as the post indicates, actual results will vary with the publisher.

Also in my tests, ads on the left even work better than the ones at the top. Though I believed this is because my ads at the top are also competing against the link unit I have up there too. The combined results for top ads and link units, do out perform the left ads.

I got poor results with ads in the content. However, this might be because the ad was too small. I used the 125×125 format and I setup my site to use 100% of the screen width. A lot of publishers have good success with content ads, so I will need to retest the content ads with a bigger format and a narrower content width.

I've included some pretty pictures below for you to ponder. The first one is the eye tracking diagram posted on Yahoo. The second one is Google's heat map. The last one is Google's suggestions for ad placements on blogs.

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