I'm busy working on a new site and would like to hear some of your experiences with the placement of the wide skyscraper ad unit. According to the Adsense heatmap, the best position is to the left of your content. I'm thinking of using a top navigation and then the skyscraper to the left (where normal navigation would have been). Has anyone had success with this or should it be placed on the right? For some reason right, just seems a bit more natural to me. I can experiment with the layout, but seeing as it's a very new site, the traffic won't give me much results so I'm hoping to hear from you guys.
For me on one of my websites, sky scraper on the left did well than when it was in the right. And, navigation menu is on the left. I placed sky scraper below the nav. menu. I have never tried Wide sky sc. Please post your result here when you able to judge something. It will be useful for me and others.
I've run both and found the right side to perform better. It may be simply an anomally, but I also seem to get less PSA and non-relevant ads when they're on the right. Bots read left to right, top to bottom, so I also like to place on the right to give the spiders more content to chew on ... just me though - I'd suggest running a specific channel and see which does better for you over a sustained period of time and go with that.
Guess I'll have to go the old experiment route then. I'm going for a right placement for a week to see how it performs. Luckily it's very easy to swap things around. Thank the powers that be for CSS!
Left or right? Top or Bottom? Blue or Red? Noone can tell you exactly whats wrong & right...best thing is to experiment...You are going to do the right thing..One week left & One week right..You have your answer!!!
Is one week enough? For sites with low traffic I think one week is a short time frame. Depends on the type of site is but probably the difference will not be much. Anyway post the outcomes of your trials, please.
From Google ... Certain locations tend to be more successful than others. This "heat map" illustrates these ideal placements on a sample page layout. The colors fade from dark orange (strongest performance) to light yellow (weakest performance). All other things being equal, ad placements above the fold tend to perform better than those below the fold. Ads placed near rich content and navigational aids usually do well because users are focused on those areas of a page.