Go With The 'Flow'

5.2 Go With The 'Flow'

Identify the reading patterns of your visitors. What draws their attention first? What makes them 'click'?

Like I said, you want to put your ads in areas that draw your visitors in with interesting content. There’s no point in putting your ads in some out of the way place where no one ever looks. Your users will follow your content, so you need to make sure that your ads follow that content too.

Look at the design and layout of your webpage, identify the places that you think most of your users look — and mark each of them as a likely spot to put your ads.

Google actually offers a pretty neat tool to help you identify where your users are most likely to look. Their heat map at

https://www.google.com/support/adsens/bin/static.py?page=tips.html

sums up the options pretty well:

Fig. 5.1 Google’s Heat Map shows an “average” site’s hot spots. The darker areas are the regions where people look most frequently. But remember, no site is average. Where do your visitors look most?

Google says that certain areas are more effective than others. Researchers have also found that when people look at a website, their eyes start in the top left hand corner and then travel down the page from left to right.

All of this is true but the hottest areas can vary from site to site. You will need to experiment to find the very best places for you.