Embedding AdSense Ads Above the Fold May Be Ugly, But it Increases Your Revenue…
There can be agreement from my fans and detractors a like that my websites are not the prettiest things to grace the Internet over the years. Blocky, functional, rather ugly… all these words can be used, and I would be hard pressed to disagree. My sites are not works of art, BUT they do pay some bills..!
One of my design choices is to lump 3 large AdSense banner ads at the top of the page. With AdSense you can only run 3 blocks of ads on any one page so you have to think how you will use those blocks. Some blocks are so small they will only show one ad while others are big enough to display 3.
Many people choose to scatter the AdSense ads throughout a page to make the overall page look “prettier”. I have forsaken this idea and gone with a brute force strategy.
There are a few reasons for this. First of all is that although spreading ads throughout a page may make the page look prettier it also makes it more confusing to read. At the end of the day I want my sites to be as useable as possible. When ads are scattered willy nilly it can be difficult for a visitor to differentiate between a menu and an ad. By lumping them at the top of the page the visitor can easily ignore them and scroll down the page if they choose.
The second reason is a very basic concept from the old days of print marketing… Ads that are “above the fold” are viewed more then the ones that are “below the fold”. When a web page opens my visitors will see ALL the ads on my pages. Whereas people who embed ads “below the fold” lose ad impressions when visitors come to a page and then quickly leave.
The third reason that ties into the second is that my visitors are people that are ACTIVELY looking for solutions. They don’t care if they learn the answer from my web page, or from a vendors. Since AdSense ads change based on the content of a page this means that many of my visitors hit my page, see a text ad that looks more promising, and bounce off. As long as I get my CPC they can bounce all they like.
These are some things you should think about when you decide to monetize your website. MANY people say how amateurish and crappy my sites look. Being that my Blog and Community are now pulling in around $1300 a month for what I spend possibly 30 minutes a day on… well… “How much did you earn from your fancy dancy blog last month?”
You can look at my sites: http://www.EverymanIT.com and http://www.ETCGCommunity.com .
Eli the Computer Guy has 16 years experience in technology being the guy to fix "it". From the Army, to building out new satellite offices for the enterprise, to running his own shop with 9 full time employees Eli has real world experience with almost all systems that technicians will be working with. Eli has 1600 hours of formal technical beyond his Bachelors Degree in Criminal Justice on technologies ranging from Avaya PBX/ Audix to Microsoft, Red Hat Linux, MySQL, Cisco and much more.
