Benjamin Niemann

My first AdSense experiment

Just for fun I added AdSense text ads to some of the pages on my site (those pages that receive the most traffic). The income is not worth mentioning, but when I added another block of link ads, I observed an interesting effect.

The box with the text ads is place on the right - according to Googles heat map a suboptimal location. When I added the text links a few weeks later on the left, right below the navigation box, the click through rates for the text ads made a big jump up (factor 4-5) - but the link ads are hardly ever clicked.

The data is hardly sufficient to be statistically relevant, so I can only guess what happened. The link ads are in a more efficient location on the page, so people are likely to notice them first. When they see that these are just advertising, they move their focus away from it and they hit the text ads box. Because the text ads contain more informations than the link ads, they appear to be more relevant, so people are likely to click.

So - if my theory is correct - the link ads, while pretty inefficient on their own, improve the "value" of the right hand side of the page.

Of course it could just be coincidence - for example a change of the link ads that made them more relevant.