If you put banner advertisements on your website, one of your goals should obviously be to get visitors to click on those ads (and then depending on your agreement with the advertiser, maybe purchase something or perform some other action on the advertiser’s site). But it all starts with a click - and there are a lot of factors that can influence the rate at which visitors click your ads (called “click through rate” (CTR)). Two major factors are:

• ad relevance (how well the ad is suited to your site’s audience)
• ad placement (where the ad is located on a page)

Maximizing relevance is a real art, and comes with understanding your audience demographic. Placement, on the other hand, consists of a finite list of options. And I just saw a great example of placing ads conspicuously, but not obtrusively - on a favorite website of mine: Pandora.com

Generally, when it comes to display ads, proper placement is all about finding that balance between annoying in your face pop-ups and other floating ads (which get attention, but tend to be a nuissance) and subtle, easily overlooked ads (which don’t inhibit the user experience, but also don’t generate any revenue for you or value for the advertiser). Ads embedded in the text content of a site (in-text ads) are often considered a good balance of noticeable, but unobtrusive placement. But I’d like to nominate the “pseudo-floating” banner as an even more effective means of achieving the right balance.

Pandora.com has made excellent use of this “pseudo-floating” banner placement. The banners on their site seem to overlap the visual frames of the site - making the banners look like they’re floating (above other content) - but in this case there is no other page content behind the banner (so I call these pseudo-floating banners). I don’t have any of Pandora’s click-through numbers to back up my statement, but I think it’s brilliant.

By the way, Pandora, as a free music service, is brilliant, too. Whether you care about CTR or not, the site is worth a poke around.