Ad positioning is very important for blogs or sites that use ads as a source of revenue. While there are many "Adsense optimized" templates out there on the Internet, I believe that there is a pattern in all this strategies.
Consider the following post about Ad Positioning: Tactics to increase you Adsense Earnings Overnight by Darren Rowse where also outlined his little experiment about changing ad positions which was also further explained in Where To Put Adsense Ads And A Dynamic Ad Placement Plugin by Jozzua. In Darren's article he illustrates the before (left) and after(right) ad positions. The change in position actually yielded a 40 % increase in his CTR.
Another example is the the recommended ad positions by Google Adsense. Here is a sample:
If you compare the images provided by Darren and the one from adsense it seems that areas with the higest click through rates are in the upper left area of the site somewhere just below the header / top navigation. Why is that? The answer may lie on how human eyes usually navigate a web page.
A few years ago, Eyetools Eyetracking Research published an interesting image on how many web users perceive a web page. Here is the image from their site.
The image indicates where the users eyes focus more (indicated by the red areas). You may notice that the concentration of eye focus and clicks are gathering in a triangular shape on the upper left part of the page which incidentally very much similar to Darren's findings and the Google Adsense heatmap. You can find the article from Eyetools Eyetracking Research here. This triangular area is fondly know as the Golden Triangle
What does this mean? Well if we are going to base it on Darren's results, Google adsense heatmap and the Eyetools Eyetracking research, It would be best to place your ads within this "Golden Triangle". But my opinion is that this can be used to attain higher CTR's for call to action buttons like a buy now or signup now type of link / button. I am currently doing some similar tests, Ill see what results will turn up. How about you guys? does the Golden Triangle for Ad Positions apply to you?
