Giving up extra real-estate on a page over to ads is a hard choice to do. A balance needs to be acheived between the space used for advertising and the user experience. You want ads to get noticed by visitors (so they click), but you don’t want the experience to feel like they are sitting through 15 minutes of ads to watch 5 minutes of quality television (dispite how well it works for commercial tv networks).

The layout and design are important to keep things asthetically pleasing for the visitor, however making ads stand out enough to be clicked on is also important as far as adsense revenue goes.

I’ve added an extra AdSense block to the foot of single posts on this site, to see if they get noticed.

Currently my banner ads across the top of the page, which take up very little real-estate, blend in well with the rest of the site and do not get in the way are the most popular ads to click on at this site. The little google ad bar down the right hand side under the contact details and paypal link are probably placed very badly, because they never get noticed, or if they do rarely get clicked on.

So I’m trying an ad block below the content before the comments when viewing a single post (not on search results or semi-static pages). I only want to keep 2 ad blocks on the site in total, as I really am against bombarding the users with ads, but unless the advertising is actually getting some attention i’ll continue to tweak it until it does, as without it getting attention I would rather not have it at all.

I’ll post again on this topic in a couple of weeks and let you know the results of my adsense experiment.