Go4th.org Takes AdSense Forward

25.7 Go4th.org Takes AdSense Forward

Go4th.org also uses vertical columns, but this site has a much heavier focus on content and still manages to blend the ads in well. In fact, placing a

vertical ad unit on the side of a blog has become pretty much a standard layout for many online publishers. You have a sidebar full of links, a link unit under the blog entry headline and a skyscraper on either the left or the right.

It’s the obvious way to lay out a blog page, and it works.

But that doesn’t mean you still can’t be creative and come up with new ways to blend those ads into the page and make them more attractive to users.

Go4th.org does this in a really interesting way.

The blog entry — or rather, the articles that the site posts — are positioned in a wide space in the middle of the page sandwiched between two sidebars. The sidebar on the left is where the ads go. The sidebar on the right contain a bunch of links to external sites.

And this is where things get clever...

The design of each of those areas is exactly the same. Even the “Ads by Goooogle” line has been copied and turned into “May lead to external sites.” That helps to draw the two parts together, an idea which is polished off by putting the word “More” above the ads and “Links” above the external links.

Those ads just don’t look like ads any more; they look like the same sort of recommended links that are on the right hand side.

Fig. 25.8 More links... sorry ads, at Go4th.org.

This isn’t the only place that the site blends ads well into the page. There’s a second set of ads at the bottom of each article entry. What’s nice about these ads is that they follow a little author bio that includes links itself. That helps users get used to reading content that contains links and might be ads.

Could the site get more clicks by replacing that banner ad unit with a square unit at the beginning of the article? Maybe. But that’s exactly the sort of thing that can easily be tested.

Fig. 25.9 From bio to banner.

If you wanted to use a similar strategy on your site though, all you would need to do is put two sidebars on your site, make sure that they both look exactly the same but put ads in one and links in the other.

Easy!