Most effective AdSense locations on the page?

Different people's results will tend to vary, but there must be some trends towards which locations, colors, and formats are most effective at generating clickthroughs.

For instance, there is the age old debate about having AdSense ads blend into the page background or contrast with your site's colors. Different people have different results with this.

Yet with location, some locations no doubt tend to dominate others. What locations work best for you? Where do you place your AdSense ads on your site's pages?

And what about ad formats? Leaderboards, banners, buttons, squares, etc. Which formats tend to be the best?

there're so many variables. just keep experementing you'll find what's best for each of your site. Both placement and color are important for CTR.

Right... experiment and keep very good records. I have kept records over about 4,000,000 pageviews and plot them on an excel time sequence with positions and colors coded along the horizontal axis of the graph.

Position on the page, colors, and format all make a difference... but more important for me is what is competing for attention on the same page and how much I want to promote those things compared to the adsense. Because of that anyone can post what works for them but it might have terrible results for you.

Bottom line... experiment and keep great records... and remember the CTR and income of your ads can be greatly influenced by who is advertising today and how much they are bidding and how sexy their ad is written. All the more reason to STUDY and not take generalized advice.

Oh Man! I was hoping for definitive answers. Darn. This is complicated stuff. I just started adwords and have been noting where visits are coming from content ads and I thought I had it figured out. Now more work.

At least getting good with adsense leads to generating real cash so there is a payback. I imagine its well worth studying.

Dave

Indeed--that's exactly what I plan on doing. I'll have a bunch of channels with various combinations of location, color, format, and randomize which ads show up (and where they show up) using php.

Problem there is that the fact that the ads are changing location and color/whatever might itself affect clickthrough rates. Same thing for if ads are rotated on some schedule, rather than randomly; a new ad format each week could somehow increase clickthroughs by itself, as the old ads get stale. Sadly, the experiment is not a closed-system.

So I was hoping to get feedback from people on what has actually worked best for them--while YMMV, there must be certain locations and such that are more effective than others. If people are willing to share what works best for them, that would be great. Or--share what locations are just poor

And I'd love to ask you to share your data on the 4 million pageviews, but that would violate the AdSense TOS...

Stupid AdSense TOS!!</Homer Simpson>