Placing the Ads

"Wow," said Anita, "there are a lot of ad formats to choose from. I count, what, eleven of them?"

"So far, yes," I said. "When I first started using AdSense, there were only four. And the ad links are much more recent additions. Definitely lots to choose from."

"Do they all get used?" Stef asked. "All the blogs I've seen with ads put them on the side, like I did."

"I think they all get used, yes," I answered, "but I think certain formats are much more popular than others. Certainly the tower formats-especially the original skyscraper layout-are popular. They fit naturally on the left or right side of a page. Of course, the banners work well at the top or bottom of the page, in the header or footer."

"The button format would work well in a corner," Anita said.

"And the others can be inserted right into the middle of your content," I said.

"Is that a good idea?" Claude asked. "Doesn't it interfere with the flow of the text?"

"I see it all the time on some sites," Anita said. "Not necessarily AdSense ads, but other kinds of ads. Sometimes they do interfere."

"You have to strike a balance," I said. "You want the ads noticed, otherwise nobody will click on them. That's why many sites use contrasting colors for the ads. But if you have a page full of ads and very little content, your visitors won't be happy and they're just as likely to leave by hitting the browser's Back button."

"How many ads should you place on the page, then?" Anita asked.

"I know!" Claude said. "Put them in the header and the footer and on each side. That won't interfere with the reading."

"You can't, Claude," I told him, "because Google limits you to using no more than three ad or ad links units per page. You also can't place ads on certain pages, like pages that have no real content. Error pages, such as the 'page not found' errors you get when you mistype a page address, have no real content, for example."

"I think a page surrounded by ads would be ugly anyhow, Dad," Anita said. "And there'd be no room for anything else!"

"All right, but how do you put multiple units on a single page?" Claude asked.

"You just copy the generated code into two or three different spots on the page," I said. "It's not a big deal."

"Can we see sample ad placements?" Anita asked.

"Yes," I said, "there are two ways to do that. Google has some samples up on its site, available from www.google.com/adsense/adformats. However, if you want to see actual examples on real Web sites, there's a trick you can do with Google." I pointed to the generated code in the browser window. "If you look in the generated code, you'll see a line that starts with 'google_ad_format,' followed by a value in quotes. That's the internal name that AdSense uses for the ad format you've chosen. Just search for that string using Google and you'll get a list of sites that are displaying those kinds of ads."

"Ah! That's because the code is in the Web pages and Google indexes them, too!" Stef said.

"Right," I agreed. "And if you ever find a site that looks really good and you want to see how they're doing it, use the View source or Page source option on your browser to see the raw HTML for the page." I browsed to my personal site and showed them the source HTML of the home page (Figure 8.32).

Figure 8.32. Viewing the HTML of a Web page from within the browser.