Banner vs leaderboard

Huge boost in earnings by switching

[m0nty]

After spending six months with a garishly coloured 468x60 banner to the right of my logo, with an infoline and navbar underneath, yesterday I squeezed the infoline and navbar in where the banner was and put a 728x90 leaderboard under it which was blended in more with the colour scheme of the page.

On the first day of the new format I doubled my previous click record and doubled my earnings, on what is usually my third-best day of the week. Today is going equally well.

Have other people experienced this sort of benefit when switching to leaderboard and, more importantly, is it usually only a short-term spike due to any sort of change increasing clicks, or is leaderboard inherently better than banner in terms of noticeability?

Or, to put it simply, do you have to keep on mixing it up to keep your format from getting stale, or is there such a thing as a perfect configuration?

[DamonHD]

Hi,

I do usually see somewhat better results from the leaderboard than the plain banner, but the difference is swiftly eroded if you use the leaderboard all the time, IMHO.

Rgds

Damon

[david_uk]

I switched from a right aligned skyscraper to a central large rectangle, and it was one of the best things I did. Doubled the ctr on that page, and earnings increased by the same.

[TheDonster]

My guess is that your increase is from blending your ads with your site surroundings and not necessarily the change in ad format. This was the #1 tip from the owner of the blog site interviewed on Jenstar's blog. His blog network is nearing the magic number of $2,739.72 per day to return $1 million per year. Now there's a target!

[Alioc]

The 468 banner is performing good if you place correctly. Works best just under the articles for me. Actually better than any other unit. The right side of the logo on the top of the page is really a blind spot for this format. It's a very classical design and people just ignore the spot.

[larryhatch]

Don't forget to make something blink.
It need not be the entire ad, just a lemonade word or two. -Larry

[m0nty]

I don't know larryhatch, blinking words always seems tacky to me. But then I'm from the old school who learnt to hate the <blink> tag when it first came out in the 90s.

[DamonHD]

Hi,

Yes, much as "blink" will draw attention to start with, it really does set off too many alarm circuits in the brain IMHO and becomes tiring and irritating. I am often tempted, but resist nearly always!

Rgds

Damon