Google AdSense Positioning

Putting the ads in unconventional places...

[Mr_N]

I'm looking at some ways to get more umph out of Google ads on one of my sites, and was thinking about positioning of the ads. I, like quite a few other sites, have been placing the ads in fairly standard areas, ie. at the top of a page in a 468x60 ad, or on the side, as a 160x600 ad. My question is, does this seem like a sound idea to keep ads in a traditional area of a web page? While AdSense has the advantage of showing far more targeted ads, I'm wondering if slapping these ads up willy-nilly in standard regions of a web page (at the top or on the side) is not such a good idea.

Many people surfing the web already ignore the regular banner ads that occupy these areas of a page commonly used for advertising, so is there any better ways to strategize how to place Google ads? I've noticed that some of the 300x250 banner ads on one of my sites performs better simply because it is integrated into the content more, so I'm tempted to try it with AdSense as well, though one some of my pages the dimesnions of these ads make the page look a little weird (the ads wouldn't be able to blend in as well). Anyway, I just wanted to pick peoples' brains on the matter, has anyone found that non-traditional placement of Google AdSense ads works better that putting them in areas of a page that usually get banner ads on a site?

[bnhall]

I use a 468x60 with no borders smack dab in the center of my pages and it works well.

[annej]

This has some interesting info about postioning.
[poynterextra.org...]

For articles imbedded rectangles near the top seem to work best for me.