This article will mostly discuss placement techniques for contextual advertising that can dramatically raise your revenue from clicks. Contextual advertisers include Yahoo Publisher Network, Google, and Adbrite. These ads usually display a link followed by some description text or the url of the link.
Tip #1 - Placement
Ad placement is crucial for a website. Ads that people can’t see won’t be clicked on, so make sure the ads are located in a prime spot that will generate interest. The best spots for an ad is on the top fold of the webpage, meaning the viewer can see the ad without having to scroll.
The most clicked on ads are ones that are embedded within content. For written content I prefer the ad placement that is shown below.
This ad placement is successful for a number of reasons. First, the linking text stands out on the screen from the regular text. This helps to make the ad stand out more and gives a better chance for the viewer to actually read the ads. If I was writing an article about increasing revenue and you see an ad for “making money with your own website” you might be enticed to click it in order to gain some more insight on the matter. Secondly, since the ads are embedded so close to the text, it’s harder for the viewer to miss. Ads located on the sides are oftentimes looked over, which is exactly what you DON’T want visitors to do.
Tip #2 - Ad Blending
Some users will also click on ads if you blend the ads well with the rest of the content, but usually these clicks are generated on accident as you are essentially “tricking” your visitors into clicking ads by making the links seem like pages of your site. You should combine the methods mentioned in the first two tips, using ad blending on the navigation parts of your site, while making ads stand out more when they are embedded within content. An example of ad blending is shown below.
Among all the contextual advertising publishers, Adbrite is one of the easiest to modify the code in order to blend the link well with your webpage. Below is an example of a page that has embedded Adbrite ads with their own page links. As you can see, the ads look just like links to pages on their site. The other big dogs in the CPC business, Yahoo and Google, don’t have ads that blend in as well. This is why I reccomend that you choose Adbrite for a 2nd-tier CPC network.
An article that I found useful regarding ad blending can be found here. You can try this guy’s method to ad blending and see if it provides results.
Tip #3 - Images next to ads
Putting small, relevant images next to ads has shown to drastically increase ad revenue. The reason is because this attracts attention to the ads, and people are tricked into thinking that the picture is content related to the ad. Some publishers allow this method, however it seems like Google and Yahoo prohibit this. Read the TOS on certain publishers to get more info on whether this is allowed or not.
Tip #4 - Make the ads relevent
The best part of contextual advertising is that the ads are relevent to your site (Adbrite does not have this feature, they just put up generic network ads). Google and Yahoo both target their ads decently well, but Google Adsense definitely has the best ads that are relevant to your site. To increase ad relativity, make sure the keywords that you want ads for are repeated throughout. For example, if I wanted to display ads related to “making money” I would repeat the phrase making money many times on my page. If you want to be making money, and making money is what you want, then make sure that you are making money by implementing these ads well. It’s also best to spread your keywords throughout the page instead of concentrated in one area like above.
Tip #5 - Keep to one theme
This kind of ties in with making your ads relevent, but make sure your website concentrates one one certain type of category. For example, GameSpot.com is a site that focuses on games, while IGN.com has sections over games, movies, comics, cars, etc. GameSpot, if they used Google Adsense, would be serving the most relevent ads - gaming ads. While IGN, if they used Google Adsense, would be serving ads about all sorts of things because they have so many sectors. If a gamer goes on IGN and sees an ad about Japanese Movies, they probably won’t be enticed to click. Of course, these statements are just theoretically speaking, the main point is that if your website is focused on one topic, the ads will be better served to your target audience. If you have a website that covers many things, it will be harder to generate ads that interest your users.
Tip #6 - Do your research
Each publisher allows you to create separate channels for your ads so you can track how each individual ad unit is doing. Look over your ads and see which ones are performing the best, and then make a judgement as to which ads you should keep and which ones you should alter or get rid of. Constantly looking over your statistics is a key factor to increasing your ad revenue.
Stay tuned for more blog posts about increasing your ad revenue.
