Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I have always kept them at the bottom, as it keeps them from blocking your content and makes the whole site look better (in my opinion), but a lot of sites now seem to place them at the top.
Do you notice a higher click through rate when they are at the top or have you got a better place?
But it depends on the traffic to a particular page. If you get a lot of visitors who are coming to a page from a search engine, say, and who look at your page and decide it's not the info. they want, then ads at the top are good because they can use them to click away.
But I can imagine that if you have a page that gets visitors who usually read the entire thing and THEN want to leave, ads at the bottom would work better.
So, experiment. One placement might be best for all the pages on your site, or you might find that certain pages do well with one placement, and other pages with another.
I appreciate the concerns re the look and feel of the page, but if you make some attempt to harmonise the colour scheme to blend the ads into the existing page layout, that makes a big difference IMHO. What works for me in this respect is having the page and ad text in black, and all of the links in blue (convention) and a grey border to match other elements on the page.