If almost of your visitor come from seach engine put the big ads top as top possible. when they come to your site they will see your ads first and some of them will click
for my sites I just try to place the ads near areas users will most likely look or click on. It took me a good month to situate my ads on sciphone.
Most of what I have found on the forum's suggest that you should worry more about content and traffic and the clicks will follow. If all you focus on is clicks then your site will suffer.
the large rectangle boxes work best for me. Placing them with the article works very well. Your focus should be on the reader first. Write quality content. No short cuts here. Place an a large ad block above the fold can help. doing this works great for many of my blogs. I do make sure I don't have ads all over. One header and on the side bar a large rectangle box. For static sites working the box ad into the article gets me the best ctr. I hear the tricks about placing adds next to were your other site links are in an effort to trick the user to click. If you have quality content the user wants to read then the ads will be relavent to your content and your readers will want to click your ads. We all click google ads when were looking for something or find something interesting. Do make sure the ads blend nice into the site.
I'm still needing to learn to manipulate the designs of templates. I think you're right about limiting the number of ads, as well. Those are some really good points you made here. I wish I could give you more rep.
not necessarily. the ad targeting algos that google uses have become far less targeted than they used to be... i see ads coming up that match just one single word on the page, like "free" for instance. so the ad is totally out of context for the page, the only thing that google cares about is that one word. time for some section targeting, to fix what google screws up.
Isn't that against the TOI of adsense ? Doesn't it say somewhere that tempering the ads in anyway is not allowed...?