Should You Place Google AdSense Ads Above The Fold

Above the Fold refers to any area on the web page that is prominently displayed and this generally is the upper half section that the visitors can read without touching the scroll bars of the browser.
It’s a common understanding that Google AdSense Ads perform best when placed above the fold as they get maximum attention and hence a higher CTR.

There’s however a different opinion now which says that Ads may get more clicks when placed next to the content or near the comments:
"A couple years ago there was this idea that putting the ad above the fold would get more attention. However visitors just completely overlooked the ads because they were coming to the site to read the content and didn’t give a doodle about what sat on the way top of the page. And really, when people were reading the content, the ads were too high to see and/or click on and website owners and their advertisers were not making any mula.
Today we put the ads next to the content or in between action points like commenting or sharing links. This is because the visitor subconsciously sees the ad and may be looking for something to do next. When next to an action point like a comment, the visitor is no longer reading the article and is much more inclined to click on an ad. "

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Contextual AdSense Ads for RSS Feeds – See Sample Codea

The rumors are true. Google AdSense ads for RSS feeds are coming next week. Here’s a sample code that will be inserted in your FeedBurner feed for showing AdSense ads.

The AdSense ads inside FeedBurner RSS feeds will be contextual and CPM based – i.e., you get paid based on the number of ad impression – so the more subscribers you have, the more revenue.
And most likely you’ll see image banners in the feeds, not the regular text ads. THe RSS ads can be managed via the regular AdSense dashboard.
Google will initially experiment with only a small group of AdSense publishers but will eventually roll-out the program to all AdSense and FeedBurner customers. The layout will be quite different from the earlier screenshots.

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Google AdSense Ads in RSS Feeds – First Impressions & Screenshots

The AdSense for RSS feeds program is now live for some publishers and Google has also discontinued the FeedBurner Advertising Network in favor of AdSense.
 
*If you are subscribed to this RSS feed in either Google homepage or any news reader, you may have already seen the new feed ads at the bottom of each article.

AdSense Ads in Feeds are contextual and are available in banner (468×60) and medium rectangle (300×250) formats. They are probably a mix of CPC and CPM ads because you can show either text ads or image ads or even a combination of both in your feeds.
Here’s a screenshot of a feed ad inside an article that was about search engine optimization – notice the relevance of the ad.

AdSense publishers can choose how frequently the ads should appear in the feed and whether ads should appear in articles that are relatively short.
What’s different from FeedBurner though is that with Google AdSense you can position ads either at the bottom or top of the feed item.

There are two big advantages here:
a. The ads are contextual, very relevant and publishers may therefore see better returns.
b. A large majority of FeedBurner advertisers targeted their ad campaigns for US traffic so publishers were not able to successfully monetize traffic from other countries. That will change with AdSense for Feeds as Google has advertisers almost everywhere.
Here’s another example of an RSS ad – its a medium rectangle this time.

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AdSense Click Tracking Data in Google Analytics Is Coming Soon

If you are using Google AdSense on your website, here’s some very good news.
You will soon be able to track visitor clicks on your AdSense ads using Google Analytics reports.
These new reports in Analytics have enough details to help you exactly measure AdSense performance on every single page of your website.

Google dropped hints on AdSense – Analytics integration some two years but the program has finally entered the beta phase as revealed by a post on GoogleCache (offline now).

Luckily the story remained in FeedDemon’s cache and picking from there, following is a summary of AdSense related data that you’ll be able to track via Google Analytics:
1. The number of times AdSense ads were clicked on any given web page.
2. AdSense revenue generated per page for clicks mentioned in #1.
3. You’ll also know the CTR and CPM for all web pages – no need to create individual URL channels in your AdSense dashboard.
4. "Top AdSense Referrers" – this is the most interesting report as it helps you know about revenue made per referring websites.
Let’s take an example. Assume two sites – digg.com and cnn.com – have linked to a page on your website and are sending some referral traffic. Now Analytics will tell you exactly how much AdSense revenue you are making through traffic from each of these sites.
This report has enormous potential as it lends a "measurable" value to each incoming link. Some sites could even use this as a replacement for affiliate programs.
All the above information is based on screenshots that were shared by Google Cache but that story is no longer available on the web.

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