Jen from Jensense writes a great post on an event that she was invited to speak at by Google about the Adsense program. The post is full of all kinds of great information not only on the event but on Adsense itself. I highly recommend you check it out for bits of information like:
- Many of the people who work on Adsense are also Adsense publishers! (I wonder what their sites are – it would actually be worth finding them to observe how they use the program in their own sites as I suspect they’d be right on the money with its use).
- One presenter (Dr Cheng Wu of Efunda) suggested blending ads into content is the best way to place ads
- French Adsense publishers had threatened to boycott the program unless Adsense made changes to payment systems (ie sending cheques in local currency or having direct deposit payments as they’ve just announced).
- Attendees were given a heatmap showing them where Google had found best placement of ads to be (wouldn’t mind getting my hands on one of those – anyone got one they want to share?)
Sounds like a fascinating event to be at and one that I’d love to see more reporting on with details of what was presented if anyone who was there feels that they’d like to let the rest of us know about. Lets hope they do more of these sorts of meetings.
on my SmartMoney link I linked to a heat map that was done for the google search results page. I would think that it could be transposed to any page since I believe these eye patterns are set culturally and don’t vary too much based on the actual content of the page. There is another useful study here Eyetracker
I’ve seen that heat mat smartMoney – i think there are some general principles that one could take from it – however the heat maps I’ve seen on other sites indicate that blogs and other websites are quite different to search engine results pages – some similarities – but soem real differences also.