How to place advertisements effectively, but not annoyingly

Question

I was wondering the best way to place advertising on a website, so users don't feel like the advertising is forced upon them. It can often make a website unpleasant to be on (like quite a lot of u), but on sites like facebook, they see

As is obvious from most people's personal experience, pop-ups are definitely not the way to go.

What is slightly less clear is where to place advertising, how much to use, etc etc.

Are banners along the top okay? Is it better to be more discreet?

I hope I'm not being to general.

Answer 1

With the popularity of pop up blockers and people being so used to adverts on the page ,people have got used to tuning out advertisements unless they are in your face like annoying popups or pop unders which just annoys them.

Hence most people just tune out ads which are located in the top part as well as the sidebar.However a conversation I had with a senior manager in the ads division of a large software company revealed that heatmaps and click maps showed that the best ad conversions resulted from those ads which were placed on the right hand side of the content (Provided the ad is relevant to the content) .During our discussion we theorized that people while reading from left to right (assuming we are dealing with pages in languages which read from left to right) were processing details about the content and seeing an advert which was relevant to the content seemed much more homogeneous to what they were expecting on the page as opposed to something which was a total contrast ,say a ad for cigarettes on a anti smoking page

Answer 2

People don't really want to look at advertising. However no ads, or ads placed so that they aren't seen doesn't really help either, so you need to find the balance of not annoying enough so that it turns the majority of users off your site, but prominent enough so that those few people who would be interested enough to click the ad see it.

Many people have gotten very good at tuning out the "top of page ad" as well as several other common positions (sidebar, footer, etc) but it's still probably the best way to go. Pop ups, pop-unders, invisible ads (like where the gutter is clickable and part of the ad!) are all great ways to piss people off, and angry people are much less likely to purchase your products.