How To Optimize My Adsense Ads (Lesson-2)

Besides optimizing the appearance of your Adsense ads, 2 other important factors that determine your ultimate click-through rate are:
1) The type of ad format you use, and
2) The positions where you place them.
Before we move on, you may want to familiarize yourself with the different formats of ads that Google offers. Click this: ad formats.
So which format should you use?

Based on my experience, the "killer" formats that do very well for me are:
- Wide Skyscraper,
- Large Rectangle, and
- Square.
I usually place Wide Skyscraper on the left hand side of the page because people always associate the left hand side with navigation links.
For Large Rectangle, I usually put it at the end of the article. My Large Rectangle ads usually pull in the most number of click-through. The reasoning is obvious. After reading your article, your visitors are still hungry for information. If you don't have any other links for them to go to, and if the headlines in the ads are interesting, they will just click and find out more.
I usually place my Square ad within the article itself, on the left hand side, just below the title, like the one below:

Why must I place the Square ad on the left hand side, just below the title? Simple. When people first come to your website, they want to read your title first. If you place your ad before the title, it's quite disturbing and offensive and you lose your credibility immediately.
Ask yourself honestly, When you enter a website and the first thing you see is Google ad, how would you feel?
"This author is hungry for money."
"This website is just a junk website with lousy contents."
You don't want people to have similar thinking for your website, do you?
After reading the headline, the visitors will usually begin reading from left to right. That's the way we're used to reading. So the moment they start reading, they see the ads and if the titles of the ads is interesting, you bet they will remind themselves to come back to click on it, or they will view the ad with a new window.
I've compared Banner vs Large Rectangle at the end of the article but Large Rectangle pulls in more clicks. Maybe it's because Large Rectangle can have up to 5 ads whereas Banner only allows 2. More ads mean more choices and more choices mean more clicks. It's as simple as that.
I've tested putting Leaderboard at the top of my page but the click through is not encouraging. This is against what many gurus teach. But based on my repeated experience, Leaderboard doesn't convert well. Frankly, till now, I've not given up testing Leaderboard. But majority of my websites do without Leaderboard.
Google has actually created a "Heat Map" to show you which location generates the most click. You better believe in Google because they know the best!