We find that leaderboard at the very top of the screen generally performs pretty poorly on desktop. A high proportion of users seem to immediately scroll down a little, often moving leaderboard out of view before a creative has even loaded.
Indeed. Also, try yourself, when you reach a page, where are your eyes going ? You'll notice that you barely never really look at the very top of a page, you start around the first 1/3 of the screen.
"In the past", a leaderboard at the very-very top of the page was considered "good" (from earning point of view) because :
1- this format was the one with the higher inventory (it was the heir of the good old 468x60). Now, higher inventory goes to formats like 300x250.
2- ads were loading synchronously, meaning the leaderboard was loading and showing before the remain of the page.
3- it was believed that, being right under the address bar, it will get a much higher exposure, ... however, the average joe no longer use the address bar, to type URLs , and no one will scroll up to the page again, before using the address bar. Which brings another point, the longer a page is , the less the ads at the top will perform well.
[edited by: Dimitri at 9:55 am (utc) on Aug 19, 2019]
