Would you say that it would be a bad idea to put ads, especially if you doubt they'd be clicked, in the header or footer of a site?
no one will click ads in the footer. The best way is to combine them with your content, this way they will be clicked.
i would have thought you would get little or no clicks from a footer. i know i very rarely look that far down a page.
Why allow ads to clutter your site when you doubt they would be clicked on? What is the purpose of the site? If you intend to keep your visitors on the site for your own purposes, don't display ads. If you want to temp visitors to exit your site, then you may provide ads. If you are going to display them you should place them in areas that users are most likely to click. Google's Response to Ad Placement A Report on using HeatMaps
Why are you putting ads on your site that you doubt anyone would click on? That pretty much means you doubt they are of interest to anyone on your site.... so why run them? It does "cheapen" a site a lot when you run totally irrelevant ads. Now mind you, you don't have a lot of control over what an ad network shows, but you have to assume the network in general is going to serve ads relevant. With regard to ads in the footer, in my sites when I'm typing a quick reply, I can certainly see the footer ads and I definitely get clicks from people on those ads. Just be careful because some networks don't allow their ads below the fold. With Adsense, you can place them any place on the page.
I suppose for the benefit of cpm. Look at the ad in the upper right of DP. I don't know that many people click on it.
Footer area is sucks anymore. according to google suggestion. more deep red = the best area white = sucks for normal web site official page:https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=17954 for forum official page:https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=43868
I have adsense as part of a banner rotation in the header of a site (like the DP ads at the top of this page). CTR is not very good but CPC is quite high. The risk is that these ads are first in your HTML code and get the highest paying ads - so the highest paid ads are not being clicked, and those in the main body of your page, further down in the source, will tend to be lower paying. You can get round this if you put the code for the header lower in the source code and use css to position it. You should also try having ads in the header in quite a bold colour or with a coloured background to attract attention, rather than blending them in.