You will probably not be surprised if I tell you that I have not earned a lot of money through the Google Ads placed on my blog. I would say that it is quite normal, since I do not propose huge (interesting) content yet ;-) However, I have already browse a lot about the optimisation of the placement of Goggle Ads in order to be ready when the traffic will come. Finally, the most interesting article I have found is the one from Google Ads Help: Where should I place Google ads on my pages?
This article is proposing this nice "heat map" showing that certain locations tend to be more successful than others. The colours fade from dark orange (strongest performance) to light yellow (weakest performance). All other things being equal, ad placements above the fold tend to perform better than those below the fold. Ads placed near rich content and navigational aids usually do well because users are focused on those areas of a page. It looks like this "heat map" is quite old since, for instance, the post Adsense Ads - Which Position Works Best? from the famous ProBlogger blog was written in April 2007.
Regarding the ad put within the post content, I started to use the ad format Medium Rectangle (300 x 250), but I finally decided that the smaller Button (125x125) is not more appropriate ;-)
