The Get Paid Site

Ad blindness is a problem many websites encounter if they serve up any kind of banner or contextual ads. It occurs when visitors are so used to seeing ads in particular sizes, places or colors on a website that while they are still visible to the eye, the brain just totally blocks them out. This problem can lead to less clicks on your cost per click ads such as Adsense.

Ad blindness is at it’s highest with horizontal banners at the top of the page, and vertical skyscraper banners on the sides of pages. These are typical placements for advertisements so many people immediately block these out and never see what is advertised.

The best placement for ads are directly in the body of the content of your page. However, even this can lead to ad blindness if your ads are constantly in the same location throughout your pages. Today, I’m gonna show you a very small snippet of code that can help counter this.

Using any kind of server-side script, you can dynamically change the position of your ads randomly. In my example I am using PHP but you can create a similar effect in any server-side code.

Now say you are putting a 250×250 square block directly within the body content of your page. You can choose to “float” this ad block to the left or right of the page, so your content flows around it. If you consistently float your ad block in the same location on all your pages it can cause ad blindness.

In your HTML code, you may have something similar to:

<div class="float: left;">[adsense code here]</div>

Now lets add some php code to get this adblock to float to the left or right randomly.

<?php
$d = rand(1,2);
if ($d == 1) {
$position = 'left';
} else {
$position = 'right';
}
?>
<div class="float: <?=$position?>;">[adsense code here]</div>

Basically what this code does randomly chooses to float that div to the left or right side of the page. Since each time you load the page, the ad will be in a different location and thus further increase the chance that it will be looked at.

Of course, you can expand upon the code with more random cases to include different types of ad sizes and colors as well. If you track each of the case with channels, you’ll be able to see which position/size/colour of ads get the most clicks. But that my friends, is for another day.

Happy coding!

Filed under: Adsense, Chitika on December 18th, 2007