Ad Jiggling

Every now and then I like to move the ads around to see what happens to the rate that people click on them.

It's actually kind of depressing to see how making the ads more intrusive increases the rate that people click on them.  But it's true.

There's a balance, of course - I don't want the site to look like Las Vegas because that'll drive away the kind of people I'd like to think want to read my blog.

Most of the time, when I pick ads, I choose image-only ads - mostly because my blog and most of my posts don't have any images, and I find they just make the page look more interesting.  Sometimes Google doesn't have an image to put there, and that's OK; I'd rather have white space than a text ad - the text ads just seem more distracting to me.

What do you think?