Some publishers believe that increasing website traffic is the only way to push ad revenue from their websites or blogs. While increased traffic generally does escalate ad revenue, the publishers are still losing a lot of potential ad revenue. An optimisation is an act or process of making something more functional or effective.
In short, it means utilising the full potential of ad revenue through an advertising network. Be it Google Adsense or any other ad network. Here are some techniques which can boost the ad revenue of your website. But before you focus on ad revenue, make sure your website is maintained in perfect condition. Else take the help of a reliable web and mobile app development company. So, let’s get started!
1. Try various ad placements
If you want to boost CTR for your ad units, testing different ad locations for every ad unit tops the list. Some standard practices include placing an ad unit near a call to action. If your website offers software/file downloads to your users, your CTA is the software/file download button and placing ads closely to such buttons can always help.
Make sure you don’t confuse users between the advertisement and the actual download button to ensure a good user experience for your website.
Improving ad CTR at the cost of user experience is not good. Such gains give temporary results but do more damage in the long run.
Sometimes subtle changes related to the ad location can help you go a long way.
2. Compare Ad networks
Most of us are well aware of the best ad network. The reason is quite simple; some networks pay more while others pay less. But that’s not the only point.
The relevance and quality of advertisements are equally important. Regardless of placing the ads in the best available location and striking size, you may not get desired results if the ad is not relevant to what your website users are looking for. What if it is not designed properly?
Though it is quite impractical for a webmaster/publisher to track the CTR of each ad creative and screen ad on this basis, the network quality and relevance reflects in eCPM or CTR over time. It’s not essential that only a well-known network gives you access to high paying and relevant advertisers.
You can measure which network is performing better over time by testing different ad networks with the ad position.
3. Ad types & Ad designs
Have you compared the CTR of an image ad with some text ad? Are you using the default colour style on your Google Adsense text ads?
Try to use contrasting colour themes with the website’s colours. The contrasting theme can highlight the ads and make them more visible. For mobile ads, consider connecting with a cross-platform app development company.
Sites, where ad units blend with the website’s colours, can increase the CTR, especially when these ads are placed within the main content.
4. CPC vs CPM
Many large publishers overlook CPC. It is because they want a fixed cost for impressions delivered, but CPM has proved to provide higher returns over a period of time for large publishers. If CPC gives revenue of $x on average, CPM ads might enable your website to earn over $1.2x.
Can you increase your CTR using these techniques? It could be fairly easy to generate more revenue than CPM, or maybe not. You can always experiment. Try to opt-out of different ways when it comes to testing. Create innovative ideas; leave the judgment on the stats because that will give you a clear idea about the ad performance.
Your website can be better off with CPC or CPM ads because they can generate more revenue. Testing is the only way to know about it.
5. Continuous optimisation
Testing is not conducted once but it is an ongoing process. The testing should never stop, especially when it comes to ad revenue optimisation. You need to constantly measure visitors’ behaviour on your website and act before the trends start changing.
Some of the best tools to see how your viewers interact with your site are scroll maps, heat maps and click-maps.
Regardless of excellent design, your website will eventually develop blind spots sooner or later. It is always good to watch over these blind spots and make sure your ads do not suffer because of them. There are many websites on which visitors tend to ignore the advertisements almost every consecutive visit.
The best way to maintain high CTR should be to change ad positions on your website regularly. This is also why several websites can gain sky-rocketing Ad CTR after a design change.
Making such changes frequently has its own issues, and it takes a toll on user experience, but a webmaster can perfectly strike a balance.
The techniques mentioned above will help you increase ad revenue for your website. Continue experimenting to assess what works for you and what doesn’t.