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Key point #1: Positioning

How do you combat banner blindness? Naturally, through better positioning. The standard tips apply:

1. Ads “above the fold” (in the first screenful) get clicked more.
2. The closer to the content an ad is, the higher the probability it will be clicked.
3. Mingle ads to attractive portions of the page.
4. Ads above the 50% scroll mark are clicked comparatively more than those below the 50% scroll mark.

So, you’d think that editing your WordPress template and pasting ads above the fold and in all the key places would suffice.

It doesn’t. Why? Because people gloss over the ads not placed inside the content. And you can’t place an ad directly in the content by editing the template (much less editing the sidebar).

Clicks go where eyes go

And why is placing ads directly in the content that important?

Because ads directly in the content get much higher click rates than ads placed surrounding the content. It’s a basic human fact that ads that follow the path of the eyes get seen more. It’s another basic fact that people don’t read online — they scan. Combine these two and you’ll understand why it’s so important to place ads within the content.

Trust me. I doubled my clickthrough rate just by moving ads into the content.

The Intelligent content ad insertion plugin for WordPress has been explicitly engineered towards this goal. It only places two ads:

• The first one goes right below the first paragraph (or “more” WordPress comment) of your post. If you bait a visitor into the introductory paragraph of one of your posts, you’ve pretty much guaranteed he’ll see at least that ad.
• The second one gets injected right in the middle of your content (technically, between the two midmost paragraphs of your post). If your reader is actually reading the article (and most people don’t abandon the article until after the 50% mark), he’ll see the second ad.

An example of in-content ad positioning

Let’s review the former example:

Notice where the ads are positioned? Does it match our expectations?

It’s noteworthy that the second ad is limited to posts with more than ten paragraphs, to avoid “ad irritability” — too many ads crammed in a small spot create aversion to your site — since you don’t want that, the plugin avoids it.

Finally: with this plugin, you can even assign different ad code for the opener and halfway ad slots. Practical if you’re using something like AdSense channels to track performance of different ad spots.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 13:33 and is filed under Advertising, Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.