Webmasters who add advertisement to their websites face the difficult challenge of having to choose a design and location for them. Design might not always be offered as a choice especially when implementing banner ads or intext ads but popular advertising schemes like Google Adsense offer a wide variety of shapes and colors for the ad units. Some webmasters keep the default settings, others look at other websites they visit to see how the ads are implemented there while a minority performs tests with various designs and locations before making a decision.

Webmasters belonging to the first or second group usually lose money day in day out while the third group is the only one to maximize ad revenue. This may be an oversimplification but it usually is true. Why is that you may ask.

Scenario 1: Default Ad Designs – Selecting default ad designs results in lower ad revenue, this is especially true for Google Adsense and other PPC advertising schemes. The colors of the ad unit are simply not optimized which has the result that the click through rate is lower than those of optimized ad units.

Alternative: The best colors either match the link color of the website or use the default link color of the web (#0000ff). There might be some other colors, for example red that yield good results as well.

Scenario 2: Default Ad Locations – Optimizing the design of the ad unit is only one side of the medal. A properly designed ad unit can be placed in the wrong location on a website leading to low click through rates. The same is true if the webmaster copies ad locations from other websites without testing. Yes, a floating ad unit next to the main content of the page produces a good click through rate but it might not be the best location.

Alternative: Placing ad units next to the main content will always result in a higher click through rate. It is however advised to test various positions to find the best working one for the website. Good positions to test are:

• Floating left of the content
• Above the content
• Above the title of the content

There can be drastic differences depending on the location selected.

How to test

Performing the tests is not that difficulty. Best option would be to alternate between the different ads at the same time. There are scripts that can rotate ads. If that is not possible it is best to run one ad unit for some days and switch to another one after that until all different ad designs and locations have been tested. If the advertiser offers channels be sure to create different reporting channels for each design and position to be able to compare the results.