Complementing Your Ads

5.5 Complementing Your Ads

Everything I’ve discussed so far has been about placing your ads where your users will be looking. That’s pretty easy. But there’s an alternative strategy, which can be very powerful: bringing your users to your ads.

You have to be careful here though. Google forbids you from saying to users “Look over here and click on the ads... I want the money.” And that’s reasonable. But with some clever design work, you can still guide your users to look in that direction.

The rule to remember here is that elements attract eyes. When a user loads a Web page, he’s always going to look at various things on the page, not just the text. That’s especially true of images, which is why one popular strategy was to place pictures related to the content of the ad right next to the ad unit.

Google has now got wise to that. It’s changed its terms to forbid that practice specifically.

Not surprisingly, when Google brought out that rule, it created a mild panic among publishers who rushed to change their page layouts. It didn’t help that Google doesn’t specify how far images should be from the ad units. The company just says that the images and the ads should not be lined up “in a way that suggests a relationship” between them.

That’s vague enough to give Google plenty of latitude to ban publishers who think they’re doing nothing wrong.

Fortunately, I haven’t heard of anyone being banned for failing to move their ads, and I suspect that you’d get a warning letter before any action was taken.

So if you can’t put related images next to ads to draw attention to them, what can you do?

I’ve already talked about placing a text ad unit next to an image ad unit. That’s one strategy you could use.

You could also place an unrelated image next to an ad unit. Again, as long as there’s no suggestion of a relationship between the image and the ad unit, you’ll be sage.

For example, at SafetySurf.com, I put a link unit at the top of the page. It’s above the side bar, which is where many people put link units, but it’s also directly beneath the icon.

People are always going to look at the icon. When they look at the icon, they’ll see the ads.
There are all sorts of ways you can do this, but probably the best method is to first place your ads and then think about which images you can place near them.

Of course, you don’t just have to use images. You could also use a “Submit” button, a “next” link or anything else that users will have to look at on your page.

A search box for example is an excellent spot. You know your users are about to look for something and click away. Why not offer them some of your own options.

There’s a good chance that pulling your users’ eyes in this way will increase your click-through rates.