Interesting observation on advert position

[stuartmcdonald]

A part of my site has a FAQ summary page, where each answer has its own page. On the answer page, for a long time I has the horizontal two advert rectangle at the top of the answer (above both the question and the answer). In some cases the answer is a simple one-liner, while in others the answer is hundreds and hundreds of words long. Clickthrough rates in this section were about 30% lower than the across the site average.

Anyway, a week ago I decided to move the advert to the bottom of the FAQ answer rather than the top. My thinking was that a user, having clicked on the question on the FAQ summary page would be more inclined to read than answer before clicking on an advert rather than the other way around.

Interesting results (in only a week of testing so far, so this is a little tentative) -- the clickthrough rate has not changed at all but the EPC has more than doubled.

I was surprised by it as the Google hotpad thing indicate that the top of the page gets more eyeballs, and while I'm sure that is the case, it seems more eyeballs does not always mean more money.

[asp4bunnies]

Thanks for the info!

A week is probably not enough time to glean accurate info on EPC since there could be a wealth of other factors playing a role in that.