I wonder how many of you guys have tried this placement strategy?

The idea is to make your AdSense ads look like part of your site menu or navigation. I’ve implemented this for the past week or so, and my results so far:

1. CTR and Earnings increase 200% on one site. This strategy clearly works for this site.
2. CTR increase by 80% and Earnings by only 10% on another site.
3. CTR remained and Earnings dip 20% on another site.

It’s still too early to tell, but from what I can see, the results are different depending on:

• How many advertisers are bidding on a specific keyword
• Whether the hot “click zones” are showing your highest paying ads

Was reading Perry Marshall’s email today, in which he was talking about click fraud, and he mentioned this:

“..You know what’s way worse than click fraud
though? Trashy AdSense sites.”

If you have no idea what Perry’s talking about, have a look at the image below:

Now I think it’s rather obvious that this webmaster has no other intention for his site other than to coerce visitrs to click on his Adsense links. He has 4 adsense ad units on the same page, not to mention one that probably has the wrong codes.

Here is another example. This site is a little less obnoxious and it seems that he’s an affiliate of my Internet Telephony Secrets, but it’s still considered a trashy adsense site.

Now, I have nothing against these sites or how they choose to make money. They might even make more AdSense revenue than I do. But here’s the thing: sites like these ultimately damage the quality of advertising.

This is the reason why AdWords now allows you create seperate Content Ads and Search Ads. They even allow you to choose which sites you want to advertise on.

If you’re advertising on AdWords, make sure you stop you Content Ads campaign and choose which sites you want to advertise on. If you ad ends up on a site like this, the quality of your clicks is very, very low and you’re just throwing money down the drain…

So far Google tries to work around the problem and create some sort of harmony between AdWords and it’s twin AdSense. But how long can they do this? When it gets to a point where AdSense creates a limp fighter out of AdWords, what will they do? Pay even lesser on AdSense?

Hmm….