There are two kinds of websites.  Those that look good and those that look bad.  If you care about how your site looks chances are that you spent a lot of time designing it and thenr refining the design.  The ease of use and flow is important to the people that view it so it’s understandable to want to make your site as good looking and user friendly as possible.  This way users will have a good experience while on your site and are likely to come back in the future.

The problem with having a great design is that it encourages users to stay on your site, and then return to it in the future.  This kind of traffic is important if you want the users to generate the content (like on a forum), returning users on a user content generated site are the most important users.  But these users become ad blind quickly and will not click on them.  The first time user that finds your site and likes is it more likely to stay on the site longer, thus reducing the chance of them leaving the site through an ad.

If your site is repulsive to users they’ll want to leave it quickly by any means possible.  These users need to find your site through search engines since you won’t be getting many returning visitors.  The advantage to having a bad looking site is that the user is more likely to click on an ad to leave it since they’ll not be familiar with the layout.  These sites can succeed too since search engines are blind to website designs.  Put a lot of content on the page and you’ll get traffic.

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When a person visits any page on your site they scan it very quickly to see if it contains what they’re looking for.  All of that takes place in a matter of seconds.  They usually scan in an F pattern, so that’s where you’d want to place your ads.  One trick to helping your click through ratio is to offer fewer links to the user.

When they look at the page more often than not they’ll decide that they don’t think your page contains what they’re looking for.  After that decision is made they’ll either exit your page through the back button or a link that is on the page.  If there are a lot of links to choose from (including your ads) there’s a much smaller chance that they’ll exit the page through the ad.  So to increase the probability of them clicking an ad is to only provide ad links in that F pattern and put the other links you want to have on your page in another location.

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