The average drop in viewability between above the fold ads and below the fold ads is 84%. In one eyetracking study the difference was found to be as high as 102%!
Above the fold positioning of ads means that the ad appears before someone has to scroll. As the numbers above indicate, where your ad falls on a webpage greatly impacts whether or not someone actually views it and it has an impact.
People will scroll, especially on mobile devices where you have to scroll repeatedly. But they are only going to do so if the content is compelling enough to make them want to do it. Therefore, what is visible on the webpage without requiring any action is what encourages us to scroll; which means that anything that is below the fold or “hidden” from initial view, people will only see if they think it is worth investing the time in uncovering.
So where would you want YOUR ad to fall – above or below the fold? Both count as an impression but which one makes the bigger impact? The research clearly shows that the above the fold position does.
“An aggregate heatmap shows 57,453 eyetracking fixations across a wide range of pages, excluding search and search-results pages.
Red indicates where users looked the most; yellow where they looked less.
White areas got virtually no looks.
The top black stripe indicates the page fold in the study; subsequent black stripes represent each additional screen after scrolling.”
Source: Nielsen Norman Group article Feb., 2015
