Most publishers are aware that more traffic equals more ad revenue.
The more users on your website, the more ad impressions you get. And the more ad impressions you get, the more revenue you receive.
However, there are more ways to increase your ad revenue than just getting more traffic. The way users interact within your website can drastically increase, or decrease, your overall revenue from displaying ads.
In this post, we will talk about how to increase your ad revenue by both increasing the number of visitors and optimizing the user experience using different strategies.
How does display advertising work?
Display advertising is one of the most traditional ways to monetize a site. It is the process of advertising a product or service through visuals on publishers’ websites, blogs, or social media platforms.
Essentially, publishers sell the empty space on their website to advertisers who are interested in displaying ads in that space. The advertisers profit from the exposure, and the publisher profits from the money he receives.
Publishers can either strike advertisement deals directly with individual advertisers or use an ad network to make the process of advertising faster and easier.
Best ways to increase ad revenue
1. Increase number of users
As previously mentioned, getting more traffic is a surefire way to increase your ad revenue.
To recap, here are some of the ways publishers can implement to increase traffic to their website:
- Use paid advertisements on social media platforms, blogs, and search engines such as Google.
- Be active on social media.
- Use SEO best practices to get a higher ranking in search engines, and potentially increase organic traffic.
- Make sure your website loads fast.
- Optimize your content to be engaging.
Check out our traffic guide for publishers to learn all of our tips and tricks on increasing traffic.
2. Increase user loyalty
User loyalty refers to users that return to your websites multiple times a month. The more loyal users are, the more often they return.
You can probably already see the importance of loyalty to your ad revenue. Even if your website doesn’t have crazy amounts of traffic, if it has loyal visitors – the number of ad impressions will increase and as a result, so will your earnings.
How to create loyal users?
- Offer users to sign-up for a newsletter. Then keep sending quality content periodically to keep users engaged and interested.
- Let users leave comments and actively participate in discussions on your website. This creates a sense of community and belonging.
- Provide loyal users with extra, premium content. For example, exclusive downloadables, an ebook, freebies, etc.
- Create accounts on social media platforms and make sure to actively post, comment, and engage in discussions with your followers.
3. Increase engagement
Engagement refers to the number of pageviews a user has during a session on your website.
Similarly to the value of loyalty, high engagement also leads to more ad impressions, and as a result more revenue.
How to increase user engagement?
- Offer related/recommended content at the bottom of your posts.
- Internally link to other pages from within your articles and posts.
- Improve the recirculation strategy by making a header menu sticky to allow users to instinctively and easily navigate within your website.
- Use more interactive media, such as images, GIFs, video content, etc.
- Optimize the loading time of your website.
4. Follow display ad best practices
The process of display advertising doesn’t end with adding the banners to your site. It could, but if you don’t make sure to optimize your ad units, you’re missing out on potential revenue.
Users that won’t enjoy the experience on your website will leave and probably won’t return.
Try implementing these tips to guarantee your ad experience is as smooth as can be:
- Don’t use too many ads on a single page
Using too many ads can overwhelm your visitors, and as a result decrease the effectiveness of all present ads, lower your CTR, and turn people away from your content.
Instead, try to stick to a maximum of 5-6 ads on a page with short content. And no more than 3 above the fold.
- Implement different types of ads
There are many types of display ads – static ads, video ads, popup ads, and more!
Given this variety, it can be a good idea to experiment with different types of ads to see which ones are well received by your audience.
At PurpleAds, we currently have 3 types of ads you can easily implement in your website – in-page push ads (floating banner), responsive banner ads, and automatic sticky ads.
- Floating banner:
In-page push ads are advertisements that look just like push notifications we receive on our mobile devices. In-page push ads are displayed directly on the publisher’s site, like banner ads. This gives them high-performance rates without any subscription limitations traditional push ads have.
- Responsive banner:
Responsive banner ads are the traditional, rectangular ads we’re all familiar with. These ads don’t really bother visitors and are easy on the eyes. As long as you don’t use too many of them – this classic ad type is always a winner.
- Automatic sticky ads:
Sticky ad placements are types of ads that stay on the screen even while the user moves up and down the page. have high visibility and engagement rate and increase your website’s ad performance and revenue.
Using any one of these ad types is great, but when combined you can achieve even better results than you used to.
- Use different ad sizes
Display ads are one of the most customizable forms of advertising. Most advertising networks give their advertisers many ad sizes to design and display on their websites.
Publishers too can play with different ad sizes. Ad networks will typically make sure to match the ad size to the container created by the publisher.
Different banner ad sizes and ad formats are best each at their own department: while some increase ad impressions, the others achieve better CTR or an engaging user experience.
Depending on the payment method used by your ad network (CPC/CPM/CPA), it’s important to test out different sizes and see which one gives you the most earnings.
The most popular and often used banner ad sizes are:
- Medium rectangle (300×250)
- Leaderboard (728×90)
- Wide skyscraper (160×600)
- Sticky ads
Sticky ads can be great at increasing viewability and often resulting in higher ad revenues. As they move along with the visitor as he scrolls up and down the page, these ads are perfect for CPC ad networks.
In a study performed by Making Senses, sticky ads outperformed banner ads, receiving nine times the amount of clicks. Participants looked at the anchor ads for 300% longer than the traditional banner ads in real-time terms.
But, they might lead to a lousy user experience depending on whether they obstruct the user from viewing your content.
If you decide to implement sticky ads, try following these tips:
- Keep the width less than 300 px.
- Ensure it never covers more than 30% of the screen at any time (Chrome policy).
- Vertical sticky ads – Include 2 on a page at most. On desktop, consider using either 300×250, 160×600, 300×600 ad sizes.
- horizontal sticky ads – include 1 of these per page. You can run any ad size just as long as it’s not taller than 90px.
- Sticky ads must remain immobile in the browser at all times.
- Ensure there is adequate whitespace between the ad inventory and content.
5. Make sure your mobile experience is optimized
Nowadays, consumers use multiple devices when searching, looking up information, or looking to purchase online.
That’s why having a mobile-friendly website and an optimized ad experience is essential when placing our ad units on your site to increase your eCPM. Make sure to put an effort into creating a positive mobile experience for users across different browsers, page speeds, and devices.
- Try limiting the size of the ads you display on mobile to make sure they don’t cover too much of the screen and make visitors frustrated.
- Try using an exclusively mobile ad network, to access quality mobile inventory.
- Have a user-friendly mobile interface and fast loading speed.
6. Use different ad networks
Probably the most important component that affects your ad revenue is the ad network you use. The reason is simple – some networks pay more while some pay less.
However, that is not the only reason. The best ad networks are going to have an inventory of good-quality advertisements in a variety of categories.
Even if you optimize all other factors, if the ads you display on your website are irrelevant or don’t look good, it might take away from the experience of your website visitors.
You can measure whether an ad network fits your website by using it for a while and checking your CTR and eCPM rates over time.
If these metrics aren’t showing good results, it may be time to try a different ad network.
PurpleAds partnered up with premium advertisers such as Outbrain, RevContent, and Google AdX in order to allow you to present good quality ads that won’t harm your user experience.
In addition, you can try using multiple ad networks in conjunction and see if that brings in better results than using only one.
7. Track, analyze, and optimize
Testing and analyzing results is a crucial part of understanding how your ad units perform and how they affect your user experience.
You can try performing A/B testing. This is a test where you compare two versions of something side by side, to see which one gets better results.
This is a powerful tool that can get you some hard evidence about which types of ads you should use, how many ads to display, in which locations, and how users interact with each page Until you can find the ultimate ad strategy for your website. Of course, your optimal ad setup can change over time, so it’s important to always keep testing.
Other than your traditional analytics tools, some of the best tools to see how your viewers are interacting with your site are heat-maps, scroll-maps, and click-maps.
Conclusion
While setting up display advertisements is an easy process that is sure to get you some revenue, don’t expect insane earnings unless you actually optimize your ad game.
The most important thing is that you make sure to know and understand your target audience. Keep doing your best and create quality content!