How Many Ads Is Too Many

10.1 How Many Ads Is Too Many?

In general, I recommend that you put as many AdSense units on your page as possible. The more choices you give your users, the more likely they are to click.

The only caveat to this is ad-blindness. Put lots of ads on your site and users are just going to ignore them. And when they ignore one unit, they’re likely to ignore them all.

This can be more of a problem for small Web pages than for larger pages such as those on blogs. On a short page, all those different ads can quickly outweigh the content; on a long page, you can scatter them about so that they’re less likely to get in the way of a user’s reading.

One great solution is to have a long home page with lots of ads but which contains only the headlines and the first paragraph or so from each article. To read more, the user has to click to a page with just that one article.

That page would have fewer units. But because those units would be influenced by just one article, the ads would be better targeted.