CTR higher at bottom of page

my lowest level content pages showing this!

[esllou]

I have just installed phpadsnew to handle ads on my site. I have a site with materials for teachers with a simple pyramid structure:

home page
index pages for each level
the materials in each level

I switched my adsense ads mainly from bottom of content pages to the top hoping to increase my ctr of 0.7%. I also have index pages sky's which I haven't touched...only variable is the content page switch.

After only two days which is admittedly too short a period, my ctr is down to 0.3%

could be a blip? should I leave it at least five days and compare weekday to weekday?

my thoughts were this: people go to the content page as they really need a material for teaching the second conditional or the present perfect, scroll down to see if it is what they are after, decide yes or no....and then see this great relevant text ad on the bottom of the page. putting it at the top is just a distraction from their main priority....

thoughts......?

[killroy]

Actually I think it's rather the typical article exit condition. people read an article, and when they're done, looking where to go next they are at the bottom of the page, with all the navigation at the top. Perhaps, rather then scrolling back up, they just click the ad to move on. After all they just solved their problem and now are available with new, different but related material.

SN

[Ron_James]

I was considering this also as I have found ads at the bottom of long pages usually have good CTR's.

The adwords site says "For better results, we suggest that you display the ads towards the top of the page so your users will see the ads without having to scroll down", but it doesn't appear to be against their TOS to have them on the bottom.

Might be worth a try.

[bether2]

esllou,

I'd wait at least 5 days - maybe longer.

I've got my ads at the bottom of my content pages and was wondering if I'd do better having them at the top. Will be interested to see how things turn out for you.

Beth

[brycen]

I sure wish AdSense gave me some tracking... so I could put one ad at the bottom of a page, another at the top, and distinguish wich is which.

Even grouping them would be great. Imagine if I could do:
google_ad_group = 2;
So I could see all the "group 2" CTR's together...

[ronin]

brycen> I agree that some sort of tracking would be helpful.

I've actually experienced the opposite to esllou.
At first I placed all of my adsense panels about two thirds of the way down the page in order to avoid something equivalent to 'banner blindness' if I put them at the top.

Then, while I was messing about with the design on one of the pages I moved one of the panels to the top to see how it looked. Within two days my CTR had doubled and now it has tripled - I can't be sure, but it may just be due to this one page - all the other pages still have the panel in its original position.

At the risk of losing what recent momentum I've picked up I don't want to now shift all of the panels to the top of the page and then have no idea how to interpret the consequent swings in CTR - and possibly see it go down again.

So I might move one or two of the other panels up the page and see if that continues to have a positive effect.

I can't help feeling that this fumbling-in-the-darkness experimentation might not be so necessary if there was some sort of tracking available.