4.2 Go with the 'flow'

Identify the reading patterns of your visitors. What draws their attentionfirst? What makes them 'click'?

Like I said, you want to put your ads in areas that draw your visitors in withinteresting content. There’s no point in putting your ads in some out of theway place where no one ever looks.

Your users will follow your content, so you need to make sure that your ads follow that content too.

Look at the design and layout of your webpage, identify the places that youthink most of your users look — and mark that as a likely spot to put your ads.

Google actually offers a pretty neat tool to help you identify where your usersare most likely to look. Their heat map at https://www.google.com/support/AdSense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html sums up the options pretty well:

Google’s Heat Map shows an “average” site’s hot spots. The darker areas arethe regions where people look most frequently. But remember, no site is average.Where do your visitors look most?

Google says that certain areas are more effective than others. Researchershave also found that when people look at a website, their eyes start in thetop left hand corner and then travel down the page from left to right.

All of this is true but the hottest areas can vary from site to site. You willneed to experiment to find the very best places for you.