Understanding Heatmaps
A heatmap measures how long the typical internet reader keeps his eyes transfixed on a certain location of the page and overlays that over your page. An example of a heatmap is available on Google’s Adsense Tips page and it illustrates a lot of important ideas.
Most internet users are left to right, top to bottom
Call it the Western language bias (as opposed to Eastern languages that go right to left, top to bottom), but material towards the left gets more attention than the material to the right. Content towards the top of the screen, with above the navigation as the exception, gets more attention than content towards the bottom. How do you use this information? Put your Google Adsense ads to the left, just below your top level navigation.
Content is critical
I wrote about how quality content is what will increase your popularity? Well, all the orange areas are around the primary content because that’s why people are there. Write quality content.
Above the navigation and below the footer areas are dead
I suspect a lot of the content above the top level navigation consists of logos and banners and so regular readers ignore them. Search engine readers want content, so they gloss over the logos too. RSS readers will likely do the same. Logos don’t really mean much which is why they get little coverage. Think of the last few times you’ve been to CNN, do you remember the banner ad? I only remember that when I visit ESPN.com I have to deal with that banner advertisement that expands and gets in the way of good content.
As for the footer, no one makes it down that far (only search engines). They will hit the content way before then and will most likely have moved on. This makes it the optimal place to put simple text ads for advertisers who merely want the value in the link - not in the visibility.
Study the heatmap a little more and see if you can glean out some from it… it’s worth studying and full understanding.
If you haven’t signed up for Google Adsense, I recommend you do so:
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