Heat map makes a difference

Huge boost seen by moving ad

[MichaelCrawford]

I have a single wide skyscraper in my top performing article. Before I had it to the right of the intro text. Based on the advice of the Google heat map, I moved it to the left, and the click thru rate went up substantially.

We're not supposed to say what our CTR is, but what has become today is about 40% higher than what it has been so far this month.

Possibly google just happens to be serving more appealing ads today but it doesn't look that way to me.

The heat map says it would be even better to have a wide banner across the top of the article, but that would be jarringly disruptive to the design of the page.

[ember]

What is a "heat map" and what is "smart pricing?" I've been doing well with Adsense and am surprised that I don't know these terms?

[MichaelCrawford]

Sorry, I should have said, I figured everybody knew:

Optimization Tips
[google.com...]

But note that this is a general guide, you need to judge it against the basic design of your page. Note that the one red block in the map is just above the primary content. That would have been disruptive to my design.

While I suppose one ought to design with the heat map in mind, I didn't know about it at the time, and frankly I am so interested in repeat visitors and natural linking that I don't think it's best to make ad performance the only criterion in my designs.

[edited by: Woz at 1:04 am (utc) on April 30, 2005]
[edit reason] made link live [/edit]

[ember]

Thanks. I've never seen the map before. I had to figure all that on my own!

[Rodney]

wow, thanks for posting that link. I've never seen that particular heatmap

[MichaelCrawford]

I would advise that you use the heatmap as a starting point. Make sure you have enough clicks already on a page to be statistically significant - the error is approximately the square root of the number of clicks. If you have a hundred clicks, then the error is ten, or ten percent. But if you have only ten clicks, the error is three, or 30%. So spend time collecting data!

After you've done that, move your ad as the heat map advises, and wait enough time to collect statistically significant data.

Realize that the statistics are only meaningful if the conditions are otherwise the same. You may see a change in response for other reasons. maybe your search engine ranking got better for some query, but the people who search for that query aren't the sort to click ads. Or maybe the ads served now are more or less appealing than what was served last week. Be careful about reading too much into the results.

Still, I would take the heat map's advice as the first thing to try.