AdSense: Top or Bottom of page?

Which one works better?

[beggers]

What is your currently opinion regarding the placement of the AdSense ads? Do you get better results at the top or bottom of the page?

[Undead Hunter]

Hi Beggars:

It depends entirely on your audience, and topic. If you have a website where your readers are determined to get through the entire piece (ie/ a movie review or famous columnist), then the bottom is the best place. Otherwise, placing it near or at the top will suck away your readers if an ad comes up that's more relevant to what they're looking for.

Nothing beats testing it with different channels on your own site. Although be warned that its not easy to compare two pages or two sections of your website: you might be better off changing it on the whole site for a day once you've established what the normal minimum and maximums are for that day.

Thing about AdSense is that its highly variable. Beyond "weekends are slow", or "days are more popular than nights", it can be difficult to determine constant statistics.

Hope that helps,
Hunter

[Small Website Guy]

Beyond "weekends are slow",

Yep, thanks to my various statistics, I know what people are REALLY doing at work.

[keypclkn]

Not at the very top, but a skyscraper 160 x 600 in the left hand margin [ unless your page is in arabic or hebrew or another language that reads right to left ] towards the top works best for us.

We also had good results with a leaderboard about 400 pixels down from the top.

Not everyone will reach the bottom of the page.

[Powdork]

I know what people are REALLY doing at work.

Are you suggesting that all those people that visit my sites between 11 am and 2 pm aren't on their official use the office computer to plan your vacation break.

[fclark]

No, they're on the "use the official office computer to look for another job" break.

[Visit Thailand]

I could see a foo thread beginning with - "What do people really use their office computers for!" Sure there would be some funny replies.

As for me using top or bottom. Have not really analysed it - some we go top, others skyscraper etc. We do use channels for a certain amount of info but as the pages themselves differ in content it would be wrong for me to draw any serious conclusions.

[dillonstars]

a skyscraper 160 x 600 in the left hand margin

That's interesting. I have mine mostly in the right hand margin, as I didnt want people to confuse it for navigation...

If i swapped the navigation and adsense around (left and right columns) I assume my CTR would go up, but would the sacrifice in usability on the site be worth it?

[Vivi_Labo]

For a while I had the Skyscraber at the top/right on all my pages, but thought it looked really awful there.

Especially at times when Google couldn't fully fill the skyscraber with text links.

So I changed them to Large Rectangles and moved them to the bottom of the pages.

However, I didn't see any significant difference in the results.

Vivi

[keypclkn]

no - i put the skyscraper in the lkeft hand margin in a tasteful manner.

My site offers free information and the people dont seem to mind the ads.

send me a sticky and i will show you what i mean.