Testing New Ad Placement

A while ago great I read a great article about AdSense placement geared towards blogs. It mentioned what placements work on different blogs, what to avoid, what to do if you have a short post or a long post and so on. It also included screenshots with heatmaps for different layouts, and many other tips.

One thing that I learn from it was that ad units that let text wrap around them, which is what I was using, do no perform very well. Instead ad units that interrupt the text are much better because they appear as part of the text, so I decided to try this alternate layout. Switching to it was very easy, because I was using the AdSense Deluxe plugin, which has many advantages. I just had to edit the options for it, and change my default ad from a float: right to an text-align: center. After this quick change, all my posts were using the new ad layout.

Now for the results after a few days of testing. My old click through rate was around 0.5%, but after this change, it is a bit over 1.0%

The next step is to add rotation, so I can test different color schemes for the ad units and display other networks such as TTZ Media and WidgetBucks.

What do you think? Is this something you would do on your own blog?