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Considerations for suitable ad placements

Ad placements are simply spaces available for ad serving. Advertisers often have specific preferences where their ads should appear. It could be on the right sidebar placement of your web page or on a specific section of the website. Similarly, ad placements on mobile apps also have different levels of appeal depending on their locations. As a publisher, you want to offer your advertisers with a good selection of ad placements to satisfy their demands and preferences. With more ad placements, you increase your available advertising inventory and ad earnings. However, displaying ads everywhere will turn off your audience and so it is best to find and use only the best and most suitable ad placements.

Ads must not cover content

People come to your site or open your app to see content and access your services, not just to see ads. Advertising is important to you but it is certainly at a lower priority for your audience. Therefore, content must come first. Ads are side dishes. Ideally, they should complement and add values to the main content. If the publisher does not understand this order of importance, viewers will be overloaded with ads, cannot find what they are looking for and quickly leave the page.

Ad placements should be distinguishable from content

Different people will respond differently to ads. Some people will click on text link ads, some will click on banner ads and some will watch your videos with ads. Therefore, it is a good idea to use a mix of different ad formats, such as text links, banners, video ads to maximize the impact from online advertising. However, it is a bad tactic to make ads look too much like real content. People do not want to be tricked and often harbor a very negative judgement if they find out that is the case. Social media usage is ubiquitous so it is easy to publish and share ratings, reviews. Users should not be confused between ads and content. Ad placements should have a distinctive look and feel. Spacing between ads and other elements should be sufficient to prevent accidental tapping or clicking. Proper disclosures must accompany sponsored content. Native ads, if displayed within the same content area, should have a disclosure heading or link.

Ads should be monitored regularly and tested properly

A suitable ad placement does not just look good on the site by fitting in with other surrounding design elements, it also yields better than average ad performance. You should monitor ad impressions, clicks, CTRs, conversions and viewability rates of all ads linked to each placement. These numbers form a trend and any significant deviation warrants a deeper investigation. If an ad placement does not produce acceptable results over time across multiple ad campaigns, it is a good idea to re-evaluate if you should make any improvement and change. When you make changes or move an ad placement, you should test the new site on a selected group of audience. At the simplest level, you can randomly display two versions of the same site and compare ad performance results.

Additionally, different devices, screen sizes, resolutions and Internet connection speed also have effects on the ad placements. Generally, ads below-the-fold will be less effective than ads above-the-fold. Therefore, above-the-fold ad placements are more premium and their pricing should reflect that factor.

In conclusion, if you want to build a sustainable and long-term business, creating a positive user experience is very important because it attracts first-time visitors and retains recurring viewers. To do that, you need to have a balance between monetization and value from your content and other services. It does not make sense to serve a boat load of irrelevant ads on every web page. If you have high quality content, placing a suitable number of relevant ads near or next to it will be beneficial to both your audience and to your bottom line.

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