Forcing an Ad to Load First

[stormshield]

Hello,

This is a problem that has been bothering me for quite a long time. The situation is as follows: I have a website that has the navigation on the left, below there is a leaderboard ad unit. On the right there is content and a rectangle ad unit.

Because the leaderboard code is loaded first, it "takes" the best-paying ads, leaving the bad ones for the rectangle ad unit, and hence making me less money.

Any clue how to make the leaderboard ad unit load first?

Thanks,
Storm

[jonaspersson75]

i wanna know as well.

afaik, there is no way to set priority. this really blows.

[wrgvt]

You could do it with CSS and absolute positioning. That way your HTML would load the preferred ad placement first, and you can control the order everything loads on your page.

I do that with my pages, but my intent is to load the content first, and then any ads or affiliate links after that.

[stormshield]

Is it easy to do? If so, please write a short tutorial for me and future generations:-)

[jonaspersson75]

it cannot be done with css positioning. anyone who says that doesn't know how it works. or they mean a very limited number of situations, such as ads to the left and right of centered fixed width content.

[donovanh]

Well, you could use fixed-width divs positioned on the left and right, and set the left and right margins of the central div to the width of the side columns. That would create a flexible central div.

The two divs containing the menu or adverts can then be inserted in any order you see fit. I picked this up fron Glish's site years ago:

[glish.com...]

[fredw]

Storm: I think I do exactly what you need to do, with tables. I have a left-nav with a towerboard in it, and right content with a 468x60 in it. My arrangement causes the right content to load before the left-nav area.

I did this, by the way, more to put my desirable target keywords in the content up top, before all the chatter in the left-nav. But it also does result in putting better ads in the content area.

The table arrangement to do this is very simple.

[edited by: SuzyUK at 10:21 pm (utc) on Feb. 27, 2007]

[atreides9999]

It is definatly possible to do this. I do it with CSS/HTML. Probably also possible with tables, but messy, and a little old fashioned.

If you have designed your site layout/template, yourslef it shouldn't be too hard. For the slackers who use pre-defined template etc, you may have more fun.

Note: I think it's not that important, once you leave your layout the same for a while, the googley magic seems to take over, and lay the ads out correctly. If I redesign my page it seems to muck it up for a week or so. (Although I may be wrong, here, but I use this technique anyway for other reasons.)

Basically, divide each main section into DIVs. Say 1 each for, heading, menu, article, footer, girlie pictures, etc.

Position each of the divs on the page using CSS. (But leave in semi logical order, in case user has no CSS). Consider using margin, padding, and position tags. Use z-order tags if things overlaps incorrectly.

Now just re-order the order the actual divs to appear in the html code, in the order you wish for them to load.

If each div section is in its own PHP funciton, you can call them in any order nice and easily.

[stormshield]

Thanks all for your suggestions... I tried this:

#Layer1 {
position:absolute;
left:324px;
top:48px;
width:339px;
height:67px;
z-index:1001;
}

<div id="Layer1">adsense code</div>

Would you think it's ok? it seems to work alright for me but I'm worried because I have never seen anyone using such thing, also I'm not sure if it's working fine on all browsers...

Storm

[jomaxx]

I'd try that out at a variety of screen resolutions and window sizes, not to mention different browsers and versions. You don't want that ad block being either on top of or underneath any other content on the page.