Adsense Placement

[loudmouthclassifieds]

How do you place a google adsense ad right below the navigation bar and right before the browse category box(so right in the middle of the page). I currently have ads on the left side of the screen and bottom. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks....Ray
V4 user

[seymourjames]

First of all Ray, please put your exact version in your signature. When you say in the middle of the page, what page are you referring to. The home page? Can you post your site so we can see.

[Mike-N-Tosh]

You would do that inside your home.tpl file. The top of that file has the smarty variable {$pPageContent} which is what is inside the Home page in the admin. (Use Page editor to edit that). So if you want it after the home page text and before the browse category table you put it after the smarty variable. If you want it above your home page text, put it above that variable.

-Mike

[loudmouthclassifieds]

Please forgive me. I am new to all of this and dont know the ins and outs yet of what to post.

The site is called loudmouthclassifieds.com. I would like the ads right above the browse category section on the home page.

Thanks.....Ray
v4.0.9

[seymourjames]

Seems like you did it Ray. Well done. Now if you wish to place that horizontal banner on every page, you would place it in your layout.tpl file to appear at the appropriate spot. You would need to edit this file and upload it to your server. However read on.

What I would say to you is that your placement of the adsense unit on your homepage right below your introductory text is a bit off putting and it will not endear your visitors, even if your ads are free. It is not subtle enough in my opinion. Always think about why your visitors are on your site; They are not there for adsense unless it serves a purpose (like an alternative, a choice which makes sense). It used to be the case that people were click happy and would just click around; this is becoming rarer. The adsense in my opinion needs to serve a purpose for your visitor.

You may find this post interesting to read. We can help you with adsense placement around your site if you drop me a line so it appears under different conditions that you specify and on different pages. Conditions like, search results return empty results, empty categories, expired lsitings, error pages, etc. This is more subtle and I can promise you from my own sites running adsense for years that it yields better results.

Google AdSense

Good luck.

[bowers01]

in my opinion no site should have adsense or similar ads on the homepage, if i visit a professional website and there are ads on the homepage it gives me the impression that the site owner is desperate. And ads on the home page never seem to have any relevance, so put them in the viewlisting and they should be relevant to the ad.
But many dissagree with me, and its just my opinion.
Nick

[seymourjames]

It depends where they are placed and how relevant they are. What value is being added???? A skyscraper in the bottom left hand corner is likely not to offend that much but one smack in the middle will be off putting and looks like an attempt to get a few clicks from the happy clickers. It is still best to focus on special cases where they offer value.

[loudmouthclassifieds]

Thank you all for your comments and recommendations. When I put the ad on the home page last night, I thought it was a little much too. I am taking it off.

I would be interested to hear peoples thoughts on where to place these types of ads. Do you think in the category pages is ok? I am not a programmer or anything like that. I need a lot of help.....lol. For a long time now, I always wanted to run a classifieds site and finally found someone who could help me. I am very thankful we found 68 classifieds.

How are other people covering costs?

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks......Ray

[Eric Barnes]

Ray, Something I just thought about was using the Google Website Optimizer. With you can set up a few different pages with different advertisements. By giving each one a unique name you could then track and see what is performing better.

[seymourjames]

Yup, create "channels" in adsense to track the performance of different pages. Use "crazy egg" to watch customer clicking behavior on your site.