There’s a lot of debate about the optimal places to display ads on your web pages, and while Google’s Adsense “heat map” (below) offers a useful guideline, it underemphasizes one potentially very important part of the page.
Thinking about redesigning my site (as I always do), I browsed through some screenshots of my Crazy Egg results. Crazy Egg is one of the most useful tools for studying how your visitors use your site (another excellent tool, still in beta, is ClickTale).
When I redesign a blog, I always test a couple of popular pages. By far the most popular page on Upstart Blogger is Why DreamHost Sucks. While the design (my Upstart Blogger Modio theme) is a bit unconventional, the screenshot of Crazy Egg’s results (detail below) reveals pretty much what you’d expect—lot’s of clicks near the top of the page, tapering off as the post scrolls down. (If you’re curious, you can download the PDF file of the entire page).
Here’s what’s interesting: I scrolled down the entire length of the post, past the 60-some comments, allll the way down to the footer…and saw that the link in my footer had more clicks than any other link on the page. About twice as many clicks as any other link on the page.
I don’t know how many of these clicks were converted to sales (I need to pay more attention to tracking my links; I tend to just copy and paste them), but it’s reasonable to assume that a comparable percentage of these clicks converted to cash.
When I have displayed Adsense ads on Upstart Blogger, ads above the post always perform better than those displayed below the post. But I now think that a highly targeted ad at the bottom of a highly focused post may be a very effective combination. Provide your readers with focused, compelling content followed by a clear call to action, and you might see a bump in revenue.
