Ordering Your Ads

10.10 Ordering Your Ads

These strategies make for useful default placements. But there’s one more factor that you should consider when you’re planning your ads: the way that Google distributes ads to multiple units on a page.

The first ad unit to appear on a Web page always shows the ads that placed the highest bids. In other words, the higher an ad appears on a page, the more that ad is worth.

Because ads that are above the fold tend to get more clicks than those lower down the page, you won’t usually have to do a thing to make sure that the ads that receive the most clicks are those that pay the most.

If your Channels do show you that an ad unit at the bottom of the page is picking up more clicks than ad unit at the top of the page though, you might want try moving that unit to a higher position.

Frankly, I doubt that’s going to happen very often. A bigger problem is if you’ve placed your ad units inside DIV tags, tables or other positioning codes. As far as AdSense is concerned, the first ad unit is the first one the robot comes across in the HTML code, even if that HTML code places the unit at the bottom of the page.

When you place multiple ad units on a Web page then, it’s important to make sure that the AdSense codes appear in your HTML in the same order that they appear on your Web page. That should ensure that the ad units with the highest clickthrough rates are always the ones with the highest value ads.