An eyetracking study published on mediapost.com says that an ad placed above the fold* is visible to 100% of site visitors though only about 60% of them actually see it. And in case of ads placed below the fold, only 25% of your site visitors will ever see the ads.
That means 75% traffic on your site traffic will never see ads below the fold though advertisers may still have to pay for the impressions if it’s a CPM based media buy.
The ratio decreases further (diagram below) as you move ad units from the center to the sidebars or to area that are on the far left side of the page. More on
In this chart from MarketingSherpa [PDF], the bottom of the blue area represents the percent of total viewers who see an ad while the top represents the percent of total viewers who scroll to a point where the ad is visible on their screen.
This may be an hint that other than traffic and page views, the placement of ads on web pages is an equally important metric if publishers want to command higher CPM rates.
*Above the fold (definition from Economist) - The content on a Web page that is visible without scrolling. The content you see when you have to scroll down to the middle or bottom of a web page is referred to as "below the fold". This expression originally referred to the position of articles in a newspaper.
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/design/75-site-visitors-will-not-see-ads-below-the-fold/3097/
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
Funny!
75% of users won’t stick around your site either.
link
Wonder if its the same 75%… :)
Written by Vijayendra Mohanty on 04.29.08
I wonder how many people use adblock in Firefox and NEVER see any ads?
Written by Flatlinebb on 04.29.08
Thanks again for the research - Many could block adsense in the windows host file - my own ads were blocked for about 8 months, until I found out it was due to the google ad based files being present in the hosts file…
Written by pcsourcepoint on 04.29.08
Hmmm….nice read.
But aren’t you implementing the placement of ads on your site as per the study results? :-)
Written by Shobhit on 04.29.08
Most of the times Ads do not have useful info that you are looking for and when the user visit the website again he will never click the Ads.
Written by Technology Hacker on 04.29.08
Good post. I recently interviewed Anne Holland from MarketingSherpa on how marketers can improve their webpage (landing page) conversion rates and attract more sales leads.
One interesting tidbit I learned is that Web visitors spend just 8-seconds scanning your website landing page before they decide to leave I think most people who analyze thier website visitor closely will find that’s true.
Written by Brian Carroll on 05.02.08
@ TechnologyHacker .
Dont Think So
Written by Tamish Mehra on 05.19.08