Location, location, location

Yes, it really does matter.

[jchampliaud]

At least it did for my site (travel and expat guide to a European country). After playing around with many different locations and types of AdSense layout, the best seems to be a Leaderboard just underneath the masterhead. This really seems to maximize income and clickthrough rate. I’ve more than doubled both.

[alika]

Continue with your experimentation to see what really works best for your site. In ours, we thought leaderboards were the best, only to find that the large rectangle results in 4x as much click throughs than leaderboards. So we put leaderboards in key topic pages, but all the articles use rectangles. Only by testing will you see what's best for your site.

[jchampliaud]

Thanks alika, are the large rectangles right in the middle of the page?

[bts111]

Large rectangles rock!

[conor]

On our sites in a similar genre, leaderboard in the masthead, page description/titling and double large rectangles just below it are showing us the best results currently.

Although we are now considering moving the leader board to the bottom of the page in order to increase click through value of the large rectangular inventory, and thus total revenue.

[annej]

If there is a lot of text float the large rectangle to the right within the text. Be sure it's close to the top though.