Best practices for ad placement

It's important to consider the user experience and the AdSense Program policies when placing ads on your site. Here are some tips.

Consider your users

Organize your site's content and make your site easy to navigate. Here are a few questions to ask yourself when considering where to position your ads:

• What is the user trying to accomplish by visiting my site?
• What do they do when viewing a particular page?
• Where is their attention likely to be focused?
• How can I integrate ads into this area without getting in the users' way?
• How can I keep the page looking clean, uncluttered and inviting?

Think like a user, and you may see your page (and your ad placement) in a whole new way. If users can easily find what they're looking for, they'll come back to your site.

Let Google place ads for you

One option is to enable Auto ads for your site. Auto ads automatically place and optimize ads for you so you don't have to spend time doing it yourself. Learn more about Auto ads.

If you're placing your own ads

Show off your content

Place your ads near the content your users are interested in, and make sure your users can easily find what they're looking for. For example, if your site offers downloads, make sure the download links are above the fold and easy to find.

For more tips about how to balance content and ads, see our Inside AdSense blog post: Content is king.

Keep your ads looking like ads

Avoid aligning images with your ads or making nearby content mimic their formatting. Displaying ads in these ways isn't permitted by our Program policies.

Call them what they are

Take care to avoid labels and headings that may mislead users. Ad units may only be labeled as "Advertisements" or "Sponsored links." Also, avoid placing ads in locations where they might be confused with menu, navigation, or download links.

Optimize your ad sizes

Google can automatically optimize the size of your ads on mobile. Ad unit sizes are chosen for the best performance on your eligible mobile traffic without the need to modify the ad code on your pages. Learn more about the "Ad sizes" optimization setting.

Less can be more

Provided you don't place more ads than content on your pages, you can put a combination of ad units, link units and/or search boxes on each page of your site. See our inventory value policy for more information. However, keep in mind that placing lots of ads on your page may make it look cluttered. If users can't find what they're looking for, they may go elsewhere.

Review your site

Explore your site and consider how first-time users might experience it. If you're using a template builder, check that ads are appearing correctly, including their "Ads by Google" or "AdChoices" label.

Ask yourself these two questions:

• Is my content easy to find?
• Is it easy to distinguish between my content and my ads?

If the answer is yes to both, then you're on the right track

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