· What is the user trying to achieve by visiting my site?
· What do they do when viewing my page?
Google has given us a diagram of a page layout to make easy this task. Google calls this the “Heat Map”.
This heat map is useful as a positioning guideline. The colors fade from dark orange (strongest performance) to light yellow (weakest performance). As you can see the best areas for ad placement is the viewing area that is first seen when a user visits your site. Typically this will include the header, navigation system, and your content. What you want to do is place the AdSense near rich content areas that readers are going to be drawn to. As mentioned above, in most cases this will be near the header, navigation, and content. Understanding these hot zones is crucial.
For example, on pages where users are typically focused on reading an article, placing your AdSense ads directly below the end of the editorial content perform very well. It's almost as if users finish reading and ask themselves, "What can I do next?" certainly targeted ads can answer that question for them.