A colleague just asked where would be the best place to insert ads on her website.

She is using WordPress and was thinking of placing ads outside of the main page borders to the right of her sidebars.

When deciding on where you should place your ads it is important to understand the fundamentals of ad placement on webpages.

Ads have been around since… well I have been placing them on pages since 1996 and they had actually been around for about a year before that. Ads are one of the most important ways to generate income online. They generate income for the publisher who places them in their content, they generate income for the ad company that provides publishers with ads and they provide income for retailers that want to sell products to your visitors.

For the sole reason that ads are cash there has been a lot of research into how people visit sites, read pages and either see or ignore advertising banners.

Your ad company will also place restrictions on where your ads should be placed on your pages if you are getting paid per view.

Google ads are not paid per view they are paid when a visitor clicks the ad.

For that reason your Pay Per View ads should always take presidence over your click ads. You might think it would be the other way around but if your advertiser finds you are dumping their pay per view ads on the bottom of your pages so you can generate clicks with your other ads…. you will get kicked out of the program.

actually it would probably be somewhat difficult to insert ads outside of your main page area and if you did it people may never see them.

So Placing ads outside of your content can be not only against the rules but also bad for generating income.

The very basics of online advertising is .. place your ads as far to the top and left of your page as you can.

Now obviously you cant place your menus at the bottom of your page but programs like Adsense have a ton of different ad sizes the best performers are the top 728px wide one and the smaller ads that fit inside your content.

You can also use smaller ads in tight spaces around your menus and search forms.

And Adsense only allows 3 ads of any type can be on a page so three small button ads in your sidebar wont take up much space.

Remember you don’t get paid unless people see and click your ads so follow the rules of your ad provider and then follow the basic rule of online advertising..

Place ads to the top left of the page or inside your content if you can.