Advertisers have spent the time to craft perfect advertisements, ensuring eye-catching headlines, images, and layouts, to drive users to the landing page. But, they aren’t enough to achieve the goal.
It also depends on you, the publisher.
Deciding where to position your ad is the most significant choice that helps in the success of the overall campaign. To get maximum benefit, ads need to appear to the right people at the right time in the right place (position).
Making ads appear at the right time to the right people can be achieved with the help of behavioral targeting. Both SSPs (Sell-Side Platforms) and DSPs (Demand-Side Platforms) would work in tandem to show the most relevant ad to the readers.
But optimizing and finding ad placements to get higher viewability and ad revenue can only be done by you. Let’s see how you can study the behavior of your readers to find stellar ad placements.
Start by asking questions like,
What does a user try to achieve while browsing my site?
What activity does a user perform while viewing a particular page?
Which section is a user more focused on?
How can we integrate ads in the user-focused area without coming on the user’s way?
Table of Content:
- How can we place an ad without making the page cluttered?
- Optimizing Ad Placement
- What makes an excellent ad space?
How can we place an ad without making the page cluttered?
If you observe these questions, you will have a new look at the website (with ad placement), logically organized, and easy to navigate. One can also choose an ad style that is easy for users to read.
Initially, many publishers used A/B testing based on their website’s layout for ad placement, but with the introduction of the Adsense heatmap tool, it is now convenient for new publishers to start out with display ads on their websites.
Also, learn How to find the right balance between Ads & User experience.
Generic Guidelines for ideal ad placement:
You must place your ad near the primary content that users are interested in, making sure that they easily discover the relevant ads easily.
Choose an ad color that harmonizes with your website. Do not attach images with ads as it is against the display ad policies.
Always place an ad at a location where the user can easily differentiate between ads and the menu.
Optimizing Ad Placement:
Traffic sources and guidelines
There are guidelines developed by IAB, companies, and ad networks for display ads that determine the ad size and placement. These guidelines state that display ads should have defined borders and content so that it differentiates from the web content. The standard IAB sizes for the desktop are 300×250, 336×280, 728×90 and for mobile is 320×50, 320×100. These sizes are common as they are frequently used by advertisers.
Devices and Ad viewability
Similar to the geographic location, the devices also play a crucial role while placing ad inventory. One must make sure that the ads are device-friendly so that the ads do not push the content below the fold. It is best to create an ad that is enclosed near the main content for better viewability.
Here’s an example of ad placement with mobile traffic:
A user while browsing through the Facebook feed from a mobile device comes across a web link. He clicks on the link and is navigated to the web page and sees an ad instead of the actual content. He then scrolls down to read through the content and sees another ad placed just below the article title. As these ad placements draw maximum revenue to publishers but lose the user experience for an additional financial benefit. This strategy looks profitable but is inefficient.
If you wish for organic users, it is recommended to keep a clean layout, use clearly defined ads that promote excellent content. Also, one must avoid computer simulations in their ads as this is termed unprofessional.
As more and more advertisers opt for interactive ad content, one must make sure the interactivity is real and not just to increase the click-through rate.
What makes an excellent ad space?
The measure to figure out ad revenue for individual placements is Cost per Mille (CPM) or the cost for every thousand impressions. If you are looking for higher CPMs, it is important to place your ad in the right place where it can get clicks.
Performance History
One must always check history to measure performance. The numbers really matter unless they are twisted or inaccurate. But performance history is an excellent source to verify the specific places where ads had performed better.
Other than the display ads, sticky ads are most popular these days as they don’t scroll off the page as the user rolls down. Sticky ads are the well-organized utilization of space and are good eye-catchers. Sticky ads are not allowed in Adsense and are banned for some unknown reasons. Still, there are some defined rules under which you can run sticky ads on your website.
Given the presence of mobile phones, one of the major ways digital advertising is transforming is through the virtual/ augmented reality (VR) of smartphones. Through three-dimensional media, brands can present mass understanding that calls for contribution in a way that minimizes interruption. Publishers and advertisers will gain the trust of the audience by representing – how to communicate with them—and that interest is a product to be earned, not taken.
As ad positions have a huge impact on the results of your campaigns, it is important to analyze the above factors so that you can get the maximum performance and revenue out of your ad placement.
At Automatad, we help publishers to monetize better without hampering the user experience. Our products are live across hundreds of publishers, earning them incremental ad revenue with every passing second. You can request a free audit to get an estimated revenue uplift today.
