Which Layout is Better?

Hey,


I've just been thinking of placement of AdSense within articles. I checked various sites such as Google's ad placement guide but that's sort of vague so I decided to post here instead.

What have other people found to work well for placement of ads within articles?

At the moment I have square ads that shuffle left, right, left as you go down the article. The thing is, is this really an effective technique?

I was considering placing a horizontal banner ad (I know only 3 ad units are allowed so I'd be replacing another with this one) within my article to break things up a little.

Do you think this would work better? If the ads are staggered down the page, the visitor wouldn't really pay much attention to then due to the fact they can carry on reading all the way down without any breaks. Whereas if I place horizontal ads, the user would have to pause and look to process the fact that it's an ad before carrying on reading down the article or following the link.

I dunno if I explained this very well so here's a diagram. You may notice it's copyrighted! It's because I'm using it to write an eBook on making websites. My friend wanted to learn so I thought I might as well create an eBook.


Anyway thanks in advance for any inputs on ad placement!

 

I would choose layout 1

 

Instead of 1 or 2, I'd recommend using a 336 (or smaller) box at the top like you have it in the pictures, but add another 336 box at the bottom of the article, not aligned, just at the end. Won't look cramp that way.