Banner Ad Placement Heat Map
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The heat map below is an attempt to visualize the current trend in banner advertising. It shows banner size and placement (highlighted in white) on 50 different popular sites. The brightest white areas are where banner ads were most frequently placed and the black areas are where no banner ads were displayed. The two red lines are 1,024 pixels apart to provide scale. Click here to view the heat map at full size.
Observations
- The most frequently used areas are along the top and right sides of the page.
- The most popular ad sizes are 728x90 Leaderboards and 300x250 Medium Rectangles.
- More sites place Leaderboards above the main navigation than below.
- Very few sites are placing banner ads along the left side of the page.
- The observed common placements do not match up very closely with Google's suggestions.
Methodology
At around 6:00 PM EST on 10/24/2008, I captured screenshots of the latest 50 articles posted in Digg.com’s content section, skipping any sites that did not contain banner ads and only counting each unique website once. The screenshots were then pulled into Photoshop, each as its own layer. Excluding the advertising areas, I removed all areas of the pages and filled the remaining advertising areas in solid white. Each layer was then set to ~95% transparency.
Hey mate,
I noticed you mentioned that the observed common placements do not match up closely with Google’s suggestion.
This is where I think you might have went a little askew. What you just posted is the trend in ad placements, while Google’s suggestion is a heatmap based on ad performance.
While logically, if the trend says X, X must be doing well. This isn’t the case it seemes.
Cheers
Xuanyi Chew
Xuanyi, thanks for chiming in. You are correct. Google’s heat map is based on ad performance from their AdSense data, whereas my heat map shows where a sample of content sites are actually placing their ads.
My observation about the two not matching up was simply to point out that this was interesting, not to infer the two heat maps should necessarily show the same trends.
Smashing Magazine posted a great article today on the role of advertising and web design: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/12/03/online-advertising-and-its-impact-on-web-design/
It is important to note that sites have to weight user experience against monetization. While it is very likely that the Google recommendations will perform much better than header and right rail placements, they achieve this prominence by interfering with the information that users are looking for. This can lead to less repeat visitors, which in turn leads to lower revenue. In the end, it is simply a balancing game.
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