Ad Design and Placement

This is the fifth post in the How to Make Money Online series of posts. Previously, I have show you how to create a website suitable for making money, how to define your niche, how to choose an appropriate income stream and some other ways to make money online from your website.

Today, I am going to show you how to design and where to place advertisements on your website. Which ad spots are the most effective and which advertising type you should use on your websites? This is one of the most important things for most website owners.

Before you start

Before you start to read this article, I would recommend you to check out some of the following great articles that would help you to understand what I am saying here completely:

• Income Streams and Other Ways to make money online – These previous posts in this series of posts might greatly help you to choose which income stream to use on your sites. Additionally, find some other ways to earn some extra cash online.
• How Much Money I Can Make Online – Find out how much money your website or a blog can make for you. This article would help you to find how much money you can actually make through the internet with hard work and persistence.
• Where to Place an Ads – A very quality article that will show you where exactly to place your ads and increase your click-through rating. Providing you a very good animation that would show you where the most attractive ad spots on most sites are.

Ad Format and Design

An advertisement format and design is a very important if you want to make money on the internet from your own website. There are many ad formats which you can use as a publisher on any income stream you choose.

Advertisement Formats

An ad design and format are very important and you will have to spend some time to find which one works best for you. Below, I will list you the most popular ad formats:

• 468×60 Banner – This is probably the first “standardized” banner advertisement for websites. It is one of the most popular banner formats on the internet. Anyway, today it is a bit old and in many cases website owners do not recommend it for full-functionality.
• 728×90 Leaderboard – It is a large leaderboard banner which is very popular these days on many websites through the internet. It is a large width-based advertisement which is a very effective if you place it on your page heading area.
• 160×600 Large Skyscraper – A very effective and productive banner ad, specially designed to use height-based spot on your website. I have not seen many websites using this skyscraper format but I think it is a very effective with satisfied CTR because of the height.
• 300×250 Medium Rectangle – Probably the most-recommended ad format for most bloggers and experts in making-money online. It is a very effective if you place it right next to the content of your website. This format usually has a large CTR rating.
• 125×125 Button – A very popular ad format for bloggers. Bloggers on their blogs usually put these little ad buttons to attract clicks (leads) for more than one advertiser from one place. A very good placement is your site or a blog sidebar.

All above banner dimensions are presented in pixels – standardized measure for banners through the internet. Bolded formats are my favorite ad formats.

Of course there are more available formats on the internet which some website owners uses. These above are only one of the most popular formats which get some very good results, at least according to my experience.

Advertisement Design

Ad design is also one of the most important things for every website owner which makes money online using some ad networks. An ad design is specially related to those which use contextual ad networks like AdSense on their own sites.

Contextual ads need to be designed properly to ensure you the best possible results. Increasing your click-through rating and overall earnings through your website. The most important factors are the following:

• Ad Font Type & Size – When we talk about a contextual ads, the font type and font size are very important here. I have managed to increase my CTR almost 200% on these ads giving a little effort to hack my .CSS style to use similar ad size and type as an advertisement.
• Ad and Text Colors – I have spent a lot of time to test which ad and text color are the best for my sites. I have discovered that you do not need to point-out an advertisement if you want a better result from your ads. The best method is to use the exact colors as you use on your website design.

If you don’t know which font type your ad network uses, this information is usually stored somewhere in your ad network’s user-interface dashboard. If you use Google AdSense, you can actually choose which fonts you are going to use on these ads.

Also, if you know which color to use but don’t know the RGB code for it, there are several specialized apps and tools that can help you out with this:

• Browser Extensions – Most popular browsers today have opportunity to install extensions. There are specialized color-picking tools for Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome or Opera that can help you to find out a color-codes for any color on any website.
• Specialized Software – There are many specialized software that can recognize and capture any color on your computer and provide you with information. Some very good tools are AdesClrPicker and Color Picker AIR application available for cross-platforms.

Ad Placement and Positions

An advertisement placement and position is probably the most important if you want to increase your ads click-through rating. Of course, the better CTR means more money through your advertisements.

Your advertisements need to be placed in right position, attracting more visitors to click on them. An ad placements and positioning is a very important thing for every website owner who wants to make some money online.

Google support center have created an interesting illustration which shows you which ad spots attracts more visitors to click on them:

This above image illustrates some of the most popular ad placements on most websites on the internet. The colors fade from dark orange to light yellow, indicating the strongest and weakest performances on these ads.

You can clearly see that the most effective ad spot is on your primary content area. Most ads placed here have good performances and good click-through rating potential.

How Much Ads to Place?

I have seen a lot of website owners which trying to improve their CTR by placing too much advertisements on one page next to the each other.

They will maybe experience a slightly better CTR, but also needs to think about following things:

• NOT Allowed – Google AdSense, the most popular ad network on the internet does not allows you to place more than 3 advertisements on the same page. Also, they do not allow you to place one ad next to another.
• Unattractive – Placing more than 3 ads on the same page may strongly affect your website traffic. Most experienced visitors would know how to recognize your ads, we all like when we come to the easy, simple and nice-looking pages. Too much ads can ruin your website (or any other) design and not attractive to anyone.

Placing too many advertisements on 1 page can cause you the permanent ban from an ad network you are using on your pages. Also, if you want to place too much ads from different ad networks, this may cause you a ban from some ad networks.

For me, the best way is to place a few advertisements on the strategic parts of your website. It is a much better technique to quickly improve your CTR and loyalty of your visitors – without ruining your own website design elements.

This is the fifth post in the “Step-by-step guide to make money online” series of posts. In the next post I would show you how to boost your own click-through rating and leads to your affiliate products. This post will be updated once I finish it!

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