If the best spot comes last

whats the use of 3 ad units?

[chikung]

Hello,

The general opinion is inclined towards inline ad format to get more CTR. And these will come in the last position, at last in the row, may be after top, left and the side position.It means if we add three ad units on our page the best spot will server poor ads as its mentioned the the faq. And the best advs will be served on neglected part.

There need to be some arrangement in the code itself to recognise the best spot and not the position of ad in HTML code.

[alika]

One of the weaknesses of the new setup when we tried to upload three ad units is that the whole thing undermines all the experiment we did to find the best format working for the site.

In our case, many of our pages use rectangles because the CTR is so much higher than other format. When we added leaderboards and skys, in some pages the ads are served only in the leaderboards and the rectangle -- which is the best format for the page -- was left blank.

If only one ad unit is served with ads, there is no guarantee that this is the best format for your site. I'd rather make sure that my rectangle has ads where I know my CTR is extremely good rather than risk the chance of showing a lesser performing ad format for the page.

[alika]

Ok - now I found it. You have to use the collapsible script for the other formats that you will use -- but NOT for the format that you really want for your page.

We added a sky and leaderboard on a page that already contains a rectangle. The rectangle is not setup for the alternative URL going to the collapsible script, but the new formats are. The two formats are the ones that disappear when the page only has a limited number of ads to show. That left our rectangle standing with the sky and leaderboard disappearing. For that I am happy

[alika]

Opps ... my theory did not pan out.

There seems to be a hierarchy or sorts being followed. Not sure what it is but it seems to be the ad format that is at the topmost of the page. In our case it is the leaderboard. Much to my dismay, ads are displayed in the leaderboard, and not to our preferred rectangle format.

Oh well ...

[Jenstar]

It goes based on what ad script appears first in the html code - that gets first priority. Second script in the code gets second priority, third script gets third priority.

Obviously, that is the easiest way for AdSense to do it, under the "keep it simple" rule of thought. I know many are very happy to have the multiple ad units option, and will happily work around which ad units get priority when adding more than one to a page.

[chikung]

I think there has to be the system like setting the code according to our preference in the adsense settings only so that adsense will understand what spot we consider as best and it will serve the best ads there.

[howiejs]

Confusing post --- so you can't determine the ad size / format for the 2nd and 3rd spots?

[alika]

howie -- chikung's problem is not that he can't determine the ad size / format for the 2nd and 3rd spots.

It is that there will be pages wherein inventory of ads is NOT enough for the 12-15 ad spots now available with the 3 ad spots. As I have seen in some of my pages, only 1 ad format is filled up with the 2 formats blank -- and that ad format is located at the topmost of the page.

The problem is if the topmost format is not necessarily your best performing ad (in our case leaderboard at the top but the best performing is the rectangle at the center of the article). Chikung is suggesting that there should be a way for the webmasters to dictate to Google which ad format should be shown as priority, not in terms of placement at the top of the page as currently designed.

[ronin]

CSS-P?

I have a banner space at the very top of my pages (not for AdSense). It's the last piece of code in the html document before </body>.