AdSense Placement on Homepage

How important is the placement of AdSense on the front page? The welcome page, the intro, the first impression? Is it worth it, to potentially lose a customer/visitor to an advertisement or worst a competitor? Is it worth it to give your visitor the impression that you have the intent of making money off of them? While some visitors might not actually think this, in the world that we live in, the first impressions often makes the biggest impact.

I been pondering this for a while, since using AdSense. Is the potential earnings, worth the lost of a potential visitor?

Two weeks ago, I put a few ad units on the front page of one of my web sites. After a full day of running the ad units I checked the stats, and notice that the earnings covered 1/2 to 2/3 of what that web site usually makes on a daily basis! I've never put any ads on the front page before, but this was astonishing to see! Even more amazing is the fact that the earnings and CTR for my overall account has doubled, while the ads on the front page continues to maintained it's consistency. Taking stats from my channels, I was able to see that the CTR for the ads on the home page was 5 times that of the ads being displayed by the rest of the site.

Of course this could be base on the type of web site and the placement however I have tested this out on another web site. While it did not yield the same results, the CTR was fairly high as well. Again this depends on the the type and placement.

Now, the question is the lost of visitors. Do the visitors come back or press the back button after seeing the advertisement? I have no idea and don't think there is a way to find out. However, checking your traffic stats might yield some answers. If you know how to look and compare your stats, you could probably find the answers. My findings reported that I either lost a tiny bit, or none at all. When I compare the pageviews-to-unique, to other days before placing the ad units on the home page, compared with now they are pretty much even. Which means I'm not losing any visitors.

All in all, in my experience placing ads on the home page, can bring in a lot more than what other pages within your web site can make. It's all an experiment right now and I believe any one who wants to try to optimize and place ads on their home page should do so.

http://www.adtalks.com/reviews/adsense_placement_on_home_page/