Forum Moderators: martinibuster
In our articles pages which are typically 1,500-5,000 words, our experiment showed that rectangles work the best (really high CTR); skyscrapers so-so; and leaderboards are a bust. In the same way, rectangles register extremely miniscule number of clicks while leaderboards work well in a different type of content.
Welcome to Webmasterworld. We do not use links or mention specifics in the board. It is against the TOS.
Regarding your question, while the format that works best varies from site to site. It is hard to go wrong with leaderboard.
And please stop always pointing out the TOS (adsense and forum). I mean if people post numbers/urls, it's their fault, not yours. If they get caught and banned, let it be. You have no benefit if they aren't banned, so why care?
I think the idea is to help your fellow webmaster.
If they are breaking some rule, it seems to go with the spirt of a help board to "help" them out by pointing out where they didn't know they were in error.
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As has been posted. It's best to try out different ad formats and color combinations to see which works for your specific site layout and content type.
The idea for pointing something out like that is for his benefit as this is the first time that he posted. It is also for the benefit of all the lurkers so that they know what is expected when they finally decide to post. Just trying to be helpful.
You really have to use your channel function to try different ad layouts. Keep track of how one layout does on a few pages for a week. Then try another layout for a week. I tried using rectangles and squares imbedded in my text and it was a bomb while for others it works great. My most productive layout is the tower.
Most important is to keep the ads above the fold.
We use channel tracking but it's not helping. It's a large site with ads on over 50 pages. The most popular pages are tracked individually, but most pages are grouped by color of ad, or ad style.
I set up a rotating schedule to try different colors, ad styles and ad placements on our most popular pages. The data varied wildly and there were no patterns. We tried repeating the days that were most successful, but the results were not consistent.
I finally realized that the results had more to do with which ads were being shown that day and the type of traffic for that point in time.
Of course, I can only see the ads that display in my geographic area so I have no way of knowing when interesting ads are displaying to most visitors!
Slowly, we are gaining some understanding of what seems to work best. At the moment rectangles and no borders are getting good results. Last week it was skyscrapers.
I do think the site could be generating more revenue if it was possible to get better information on what works. We recently doubled the income on a popular, but poorly performing page by taking the borders off.
If it wasn't for the nice $$, the whole thing would be fairly discouraging.
