Google Adsense heatmap of web pages

Google AdSense heatmap of web pages:

Most people will tell you to place Google AdSense ads at heatmap hot spots. Google offers the same advice on its support pages - Where should I place Google ads on my pages? It's claimed that putting AdSense ads on the areas that receive the highest visitor attention (the hot spots on a web page heatmap) will increase the clickthru rate (CTR). In this article we explore the truth behind this assertion with some tangible numbers that have come from my own experience.

Increase AdSense earnings by increasing clickthru rate (CTR)
We all want to increase our AdSense revenue. One way to do this is to increase the clickthru rate - other factors remaining constant, a two-fold increase in CTR will result in doubling of the earnings.
Before we delve deeper into whether the Google AdSense CTR increases once you place the ads at the heatmap hot spots, its good to take a moment off and consider whether this technique is indeed legitimate. I think this is not black hat as it's endorsed by Google itself. In fact, they provide a generalized web site heatmap. The AdSense support page mentions that advertisements placed near content rich sections or the web site navigation will perform well as the visitor's attention is focused on these areas. However, Google always recommends putting the user first when deciding on ad placement. Google has also suggested that blending AdSense ads on certain designs and layout might increase the CTR.
If we taken the two strategies together - placing AdSense ads on heatmap hot spots and blending them into the design - shouldn't this make your ad CTR go through the roof? This is what we shall find out.

Placing Google AdSense at heatmap hotspots and blending them increased earnings 7 fold
I'll, obviously, begin on a positive note. When I first implemented AdSense on this website, I used the 160x600 format and put it on the right column. The ads were blended. This used to get me a very low CTR. In fact, I read somewhere that ads eliciting few clicks (CTR less than 0.5%) are removed from the program. I knew I was doing something terribly wrong and this was evident when I checked out the generalized heatmap on Google AdSense support page. The right vertical column had little or negligible visitor attention. So, even though the ads were blended, the CTR was pathetic.
I then changed my strategy and put ads with the content as I had seen on so many other high content websites. The results were startling. The clickthru rate (CTR) increased by a factor of 7 and the earnings jumped five times.
So the Google AdSense heatmap did help me. It showed me where not to put the ads.

When Google AdSense heatmap did not help at all
Now to another experiment based on the Google heatmap. As mentioned in the Google support, ad units placed near the navigation get high clickthrus because the visitor eyes are focused on that area.
Honestly, I was not happy to do this. I believe that such AdSense ad placements would generate accidental clicks, which, was not something I wanted to do and, also, would lead to poor visitor experience - it would be akin to fooling the visitor into clicking on those ads.
So I put an ad unit at the top of the left navigation. The results over a period of one week that I ran that experiment - 0.001% clickthru! And to couple this, the ads weren't high paying.
Why did this ad placement fail miserably?
First, the heatmap displayed on Google AdSense support page is a general one - it's not specific to my web site layout and design. No doubts, most web sites layouts are similar, but, subtle differences in colors, layout and structure might give us different heatmaps. Thus, the information provided by this generalized heatmap might not be correct for my web site - some areas on my web pages may be getting a higher or lower visitor attention which I don't know.
This means we all need to create a heatmap for our web site. And with many companies offering this service, it's not difficult to do this.
Note: You need to decide whether you want a heatmap of mouse click activity or eye tracking. In fact, it won't be a bad idea to compare the two.
So I went ahead and got the heatmaps created. Cool! The findings were even more startling.
The Google AdSense ads were indeed at the hottest spots. So why weren't the visitors clicking? And for this I turn back to Mr. Nielsen. In Fancy Formatting, Fancy Words... Ignored, he mentions that if important information is displayed in fancy formatting, it will be considered a promotion and ignored by the viewer. But my AdSense ads were blended. They didn't have any fancy formatting. My conclusion is that even though the ads were devoid of fancy formatting, they were ignored because they were interpreted as promotion - which they were!

Adsense is smart:
The AdSense program is very smart. Changing ad position might change the kind of ad being displayed and this is especially true if you use section targeting. Obviously, such modification might increase your earnings or otherwise and so you need to test and retest.
Heatmaps can complement data from AdSense channels and can yield interesting insights on where to place the ads and in which format!!!