Banner Placement for Better CTR

Like anything else having to do with Web Marketing, you can find a whole skew of articles, forum posts, and blogs on the topic of Click-Through Rate (CTR). So, why this article? It's simple.

Literally, this article is simple. Why wade through a thousand posts and articles just to hear the same thing regurgitated over and over again? Granted, there is a wealth of information buried in these places, and if you have a few years to kill I highly suggest getting started. But for now, here are some of the most fundamental concepts and techniques that you can employ in your own banner placement to reap the most of your impressions.

The ideas I present here are based partially on my personal research, but mostly on trial and error with my own web sites. First I will provide a short list of key concepts that you need to understand about your audience and your strategy. Second, I will list the most important strategies that you can employ immediately to achieve higher CTR. Finally, I will list what I believe to be some of the most common mistakes and misunderstandings surrounding banner placement.

Fundamental Concepts

1. The average Internet user is smarter now than ever before. We're tired of getting barraged by ads, and we are adapting our browsing methods to avoid them.
2. Users don't hate advertising, they hate being annoyed. Don't abuse your visitors, adjust to their habits.
3. Target your marketing efforts to your visitor demographic. In other words, don't show a banner ad for hunting rifles on an animal lover's forum, show an ad for pet care products.
4. Pay attention. Watch your traffic. Watch your visitor's behaviour. Monitor changes to placement strategy and the effect they have on your CTR over a period of time. Adjust accordingly.

The Core Strategies

1. Placement
   For best performance place an ad in the content area of your web site, directly in the line of sight of your visitors. Another well performing spot is the left margin of your site, as most visitors expect a navigation menu and naturally look there after scanning the page. Be careful with this spot though, if it doesn't flow with your site then don't bother. The right margin is the next best spot, prefereably high up on the page so it can be seen without scrolling down. Next is the infamous page header area, which is becoming a notably bad performer. Not as bad as footer advertisements though. Save any ad spots at the bottom of your page for low performing banners, or just leave the footer ads out. Visitors rarely make it to the bottom of a page and follow an ad there.
2. Sizes
   It's pretty simple. The bigger your ad is, the better chance it is going to be seen. Little ads are nice and visitors love them, because they are easy to ignore. Utilize large square banners for content area advertising, and wide skyscrapers for margin advertising.
3. Colors
   Some argue that loud, bright colors and stand-out designs attract the attention of the visitor better and result in higher CTR. I have not found this to be the case. Today's Internet users ignore ads on a nearly subconscious level - we don't want our ads to stick out, we want them to streamline with the rest of the site. Choose colors, fonts, and styles that blend in with your web site. This is the most effective for content area advertising, where users are expecting highly related content. Which leads us to our final point...
4. Content
   Make your ads relevant to the topic at hand. This is one thing that Google AdSense is great at doing for you. If you're streamlining your design and placement to the style of your web site, make the ads relevant so visitors want to click them. We aren't trying to fool people into clicking on anything, we want genuine, content-related interest in what we are showing our user.
   

The methods I present here might not be perfect for you, but employing many of these has helped me achieve a 600% increase in CTR on my highest traffic content-based web site previous to my own "enlightenment".