Affiliate Image Left OR Right?

13 Aug 14 2:52 am

The problem with people asking "should my image go on the left or right?" and "what colour should my button be?" and "what colour should my page background be?" is that it really depends on the context of your website.

There have been studies where they've looked at where people's eyes typically go on a page (it's roughly an F shape)

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/f-shape ... b-content/

Although there can be exceptions.
http://blog.crazyegg.com/2012/11/08/les ... g-studies/

In reality I don't think that having it on the LEFT vs on the RIGHT will make a huge difference to your earnings, unless you're getting mad volume of traffic.

You'll probably get bigger results from tweaking and testing the content of your ad (ie, trying different images, different text etc).

13 Aug 14 5:24 am

Yeah, that would be the ideal situation. But when you're just dealing with a small site, you'd end up waiting 6 months to get a significant result. (Or to discover that it doesn't actually make a difference, at which point you go back to the drawing board.)

One thing that I do find useful is the heatmaps feature on CrazyEgg (crazyegg.com), where you can see how far down the page people are reading, and where they're clicking. It's similar to the eye tracking thing, but a bit more rudimentary -- you're just looking at clicks, and how far people scroll.

The good thing is that it doesn't take quite as much traffic to get some sort of meaning out of it, since you're not measuring *conversions* (which are normally less than 5% of all visitors to your page). You're counting everyone, so a small site can get results pretty quickly.

You could just run it on a page with one layout, then change the layout or the ad and run it again. See if the heat blobs move or if you get increased activity.

I think you can do this in a hack jobby way with Google Analytics, although I haven't played with it in a while.

15 Aug 14 1:06 pm

There's no real formula that works, split testing is always the key as different websites have different content. It also depends on the viewer, if they are reading from left to right and the first thing that they see is an affiliate image, it can easily turn them off. Some users would like too see the content of the site first and don't want to be bothered by affiliate image right away.