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Most webmasters I know believe that in order to make more money with their sites, they need more traffic. Of course this is true but you can always optimize your inventory in order to make more with what you have, and give better value to your advertisers. In today’s article I will try to focus on some of them and give some general tips on subject.

Know your audience

Let’s start with the basics. Knowing your audience is really important for your web site. By knowing your audience you can offer products that may convert better, or make advertisers (in case you sell your inventory) love you Of course if you are monetizing your site with a contextual program like adsense, then you probably wont need this but you need to know some things regarding the traffic of the site. I will explain that later.

Improving CTR (click through rate)

It’s all about clicks right? So we need to make the visitor click on the ads. Let’s give some tips on that.

Don’t fill your site with ads

First thing you need to know is that there is no rule like “the more ads you have, the more will be the possibilities to click on them”. In fact if you fill a site with ads is like begging and 99% of your visitors will never come back. In my opinion you should not have more than 2 ad units and one link unit, or a few small banners in your sidebar.
This way your site looks more professional and your visitors will be able to know that your site is cool before they click on an ad (after all we need return visitors, right?)

See what people see first in your site

That’s a very important thing. You need to find a few non techies and ask them to tell you what they see first in your site. This is the place where you need some advertisements. Past researches teach us that a user decides about a site in the first two seconds. So if they don’t like our site we need them to click on an ad in that time.

Ad placements

One of the major problems today is ad blind users. I mean people who know very well how ads look, so they wont even see the message in an advertisement at all. To prevent this you need to use a smart ad placement. To understand this better we need to know how a user see our site.

Experienced users understand very quickly what is the template of the site, and where is the content. So they will try to focus in the content from the beginning of their visit to your site. A good thing to do in that part is to put an advertisement in the top of your content or even better use a box mixed with the content. If this is an adsense style advertisement then using the site colors is better as our intention for this ad is to “trick” the user that it is content.

Now if the user find the way to read the content he/she needs to take a decision. Stay on your site - which is good anyway - or leave it? For the second option we can use a big box advertisement after the content. This advertisement should be something that user will pay attention to, so I would suggest to use blue colour for the links of this advertisement.

If your site has a sidebar in the left, it is good to have a 160×600 banner there. This is mostly because most of the people check the left side first. So this way if the user don’t like the site from the start of the session he/she can leave and give us some money

Colours for contextual advertisements

The colours you will use with your advertisements is a very big factor regarding contextual ads (adsense, YPN, etc.) Of course the exact colours you will use is connected with the colours of your site, so I can’t say much to this. But something I know and I advice you to test, is that the blue colour in links in most cases has better CTR.

Another important thing to consider, is that if your site has many return visitors, you might want to serve different coloured ads per pageview. This is because your loyal visitors know where your advertisements exist in your site, and they don’t look at all there. But with colours changing on every pageview you may get them to see your ads.

Are your ads really contextual?

Sometimes the adsense bot doesn’t understand what your content is about, and that’s mostly a SEO problem. For instance if you have a blog and everywhere you can see the word “blog” adsense will display blog related ads even in your post about your vacation! In order to prevent this you can use section targeting. This will help the google bot figure out what to get from your page, and serve more targeted ads to your web site.

Do you know what the results are?

No matter what kind of advertisements you serve (CPM, CPC, own inventory, etc.) you need to know some basic stats for the advertisements you serve in your site. This can be done with channels in adsense or zones in openAds or even conversion goals in Google Analytics. The important thing is to note the changes you are making and then see what the results are for each individual advertisement. With a little trial and error you will be able to find out what really works with your site. To be sure that your experiments give you right results each experiment should be live for at least 2000 impressions, but if your site has some serious traffic then 10.000 impressions is even better.

Some final thoughts

Most webmasters own sites because they want to make money, but in the process they forget that the users actually look for information Be cool with the ads on your site, and always pay more attention on how to make a better site for the people who are using it. This way you may bring in less money in the next few weeks but I am sure it can make you a living in a year or two

Hope you enjoyed this article. Later we will publish more articles regarding ad optimisation, so keep in touch