admin on July 19th, 2008
Statistics Overload can waste valuable time!
If you are similar to fellow bloggers, at some point you start obsessing over stats such as click-through-rate (CTR), Cost per thousand impressions (CPM) and the all important clicks and revenue. I often checked these stats upwards of 30 times a day just waiting for them to increment while inducing artificial and self-imposed stress in the process. I wasn’t really making any adjustments or optimizations with intense interpretation of the stats, I was just looking blindly looking at numbers waiting for the # of clicks to increase. In that wasted time per week of approximately 1-2 hours, I could’ve written 3-4 good articles and most likely increased my revenue by at least 15-20%. Remember CONTENT IS KING. The more unique articles, posts and comments you have on your blog, the better the chance that it will be indexed in major search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc) and a visitor will come across it. Below is the priority list for my blog at any given time
- Write great content!
- Write more content!
- Promote Blog
- Ad Optimization
- Search Engine Optimization
- Analyze stats (ie google analytics) and make adjustments
- Blog design modifications
Don’t worry, I’ll go over these in great detail in future posts
admin on July 18th, 2008
After blogging for a while, some of us get the urge to start adding more and more ad placements within our blog or website thinking it will increase revenue but it may actually have the opposite effect. Visitors don’t like to get visually spammed with Ads when traverse your site. You may trick a few to click on an ad here or there, but these visitors will not be sticky and will forget about your site moments after they leave.
The issue gets worse if we mix advertising from different content networks on the same page such as Google Adsense & Kontera or Chitika. In most scenarios, Adsense has a much better CPM and CPC than it’s competitors. Therefore, if you mix Adsense with contextual link advertising such as Kontera & Chitika on every page of your website/blog you will probably lower your overall CPM & CPC. Remember that once someone clicks on a $0.10 contextual link on your website and is redirected somewhere else, very few will find their way back to your site to click on a Google Ad that may yield $0.50 or more. Perhaps others have had more luck mixing these types of ads, but in my experience, its better to stay with the provider that has the highest payout.
In terms of the optimal # of Ads on your site, there have been a lot of studies on this, but in my opinion, you should have no more than 3-4 Ads on your site with a mixture of 720X90, 120X600 and 468X60 evenly spaced throughout your site. I also include an rectangular/square image ad (250X250 etc) in ever OTHER blog posting so as not to overload my readers. Below are some graphics pulled from the adsense blog which are consistent with my recommendation.
Ideal Ad Placement
