When placing ads on your site, it's important to consider the user experience and the AdSense programme policies. This article provides some tips on ad placement.
Consider your users
Organise your site's content and make your site easy to navigate.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself when considering where to position your ads:
- What is the user trying to accomplish by visiting my website?
- What do they do when viewing a particular page?
- Where is their attention likely to be focused?
- How can I integrate ads into this area without getting in the users' way?
- How can I keep the page looking clean, uncluttered and inviting?
Think like a user and you may view your page (and your ad placement) in a whole new way. If users can easily find what they're searching for, they'll come back to your site.
Let Google place ads for you
One option is to enable Auto ads for your site. Auto ads automatically place and optimise ads for you so you don't have to spend time doing it yourself.
If you're placing your own ads
Show off your content
Place your ads near the content that your users are interested in, and make sure that your users can easily find what they're searching for. For example, if your site offers downloads, make sure that the download links are above the fold and easy to find.
Keep your ads looking like ads
Avoid aligning images with your ads or making nearby content mimic their formatting. Displaying ads in these ways isn't permitted by our Programme policies.
Call them what they are
Take care to avoid labels and headings that may mislead users. Ad units may only be labelled as 'Advertisements' or 'Sponsored links'. Also, avoid placing ads in locations where they might be confused with menu, navigation or download links.
Optimise your ad sizes
Google can automatically optimise the size of your ads on mobile. Ad unit sizes are chosen for the best performance on your eligible mobile traffic without the need to modify the ad code on your pages.
Less can be more
Provided that you don't place more ads than content on your pages, you can put a combination of ad units, link units and/or search boxes on each page of your site.
Check out our inventory value policy for more information. However, bear in mind that placing lots of ads on your page may make it appear cluttered. If users can't find what they're searching for, they may go elsewhere.
Review your website
Explore your site and consider how first-time users might experience it.
If you're using a template builder, check that ads are appearing correctly, including their 'Ads by Google' or 'AdChoices' label.
Ask yourself these two questions:
- Is my content easy to find?
- Is it easy to distinguish between my content and my ads?
If the answer is yes to both, then you're on the right track
