Best Performing Ads Locations

While each site is unique and needs to be considered with that in mind, certain locations do tend to be more successful. Google's AdSense ad locations heatmap shows these locations, with darker orange giving the strongest performance and fading to light yellow with the weakest performance.
As you can see in Google's AdSense ad locations heatmap:

• Ads closer to the center of the page tend to perform better.
• Ads above the fold tend to perform better than those below the fold.
• Studies show that ads placed at the end of articles tend to do well, even though they're below the fold.
• Ads placed near site navigation or by images or other rich content tend to do well, too.

It's most important to consider your users, though, and their behavior at your specific site and with each specific page at your site.
Margaret Holland, a senior account manager at Yahoo! Publisher Network, finds that “from a click-through standpoint, most publishers get the best results when they place a 'leaderboard' above the fold between the top nav and their rich content.”^[11] She finds the next most effective for click-throughs is the right-hand column or margin, especially with skyscrapers and vertical banners when placed next to the content in the main body. In addition, she finds that contextual square and rectangle banner ads within the center of the body content also do well.