When you finally decide to monetize your website with any sort of ad program, the first thing you need to do is sit down in a quiet room and really think about your website.
Who visits your website?
In order to maximize your income, you need to know who is going to see it. For the most part, this is very simple - obviously a children’s website will likely attract children, while a site about automotive repairs will probably attract older people.
Once you know your audience, you need determine how many ads you can place without hurting your growth.
The reason we suggest considering the age group and audience as part of the layout process is that from our experiments, with sites aimed at a young audience, our visitors tend to be more forgiving of having several ad blocks than the older, more net-savvy types. The same applies to the elderly: if you’ve ever noticed, elderly people have a tendency to click a lot and often miss what they are trying to click on. All these things should be taken into account in order to maximize your income.
Another thing you need to keep in mind is are you monetizing one-off traffic or building a community, and once again this is a limiting factor in how many ads you should put on your site.
We would recommend launching your site ad-free and only placing ads once your site has started growing on its own - just in case someone who wanted to link to you was turned off by the amount of ads. It’s not so bad in the long run, but when starting off, are you really going to make meaningful money off 10 visits a week? Here is our reasoning behind putting ads up after a site is semi successful.
Integration strategies sound good but in practice, don’t work.
If you read through a number of forums, you’ve probably already heard people spouting off about their amazing results from integrating adsense into the content in a way that confuses people into thinking it’s content. I, however, have to take this chance to stand up on my soap box and warn you that in all our tests over several different industries and integration techniques, it just doesn’t pan out. If someone has had success with these sorts of layouts I’ll keep an open mind, but for us it has never worked.
Spam or Profit sites go above the fold, community sites get creative.
Like what the title says, if you’re creating an info site, we’ve found our best CTR’s come from sites that manage to put the ad blocks in such a manner that when your website is loaded, they tend to be the first thing people see: such as our site here for Ashley Tisdale. On common resolutions, the first thing people see on the site is… you guessed it, our ads.
If you’re running a community site however, you have to get creative. Unfortunately, this means you will probably make less per visitor, though you will make a lot more in the overall since the Spam/Profit site is monetizing one-off traffic - and your visitors will be coming back again and again.
Finally, which search engine will you rank for?
On first instinct you’re probably thinking “well, all of them”, but if you’re like us and slapping up a large number of sites, then not all of them will rank on all the SE’s. Some may rank only on MSN, and some on either Yahoo or Google.
When we compare the earnings between our sites ranking solely on MSN against those which ranked on Google, we quickly see a major difference in CTR’s. While it’s not always the same amount of difference, I can say a 10% higher CTR on MSN traffic than Google’s is pretty consistent.
Why? Well, we theorize that Google and Yahoo searchers tend to be more net-savvy, while MSN users tend to be ones who open up Internet Explorer - which by default loads MSN and they just tend to stick with it.
I hope you find this article helpful, please feel free to comment if you have any questions!
