Article in Monetization

In today’s fast paced technology age, ad based revenue is one of the ways publishers choose to turn their profitless content sites into money making machines. Simply placing advertisements provided by an ad agency that often target the same content, an average web site creator can start earning money right away. Two of the largest pay per click publishing networks includes Google Adsense and Yahoo Publishing Network.

Although these publishing networks have their own pros and cons, the amount of money made solely depends on the amount of clicks on the advertisements. More clicks mean more money. Therefore, to reach the root of maximizing profit through publisher networks, a web site must be optimized to the fullest in order to attract the visitors towards clicking the advertisements without breaking their Terms of Service. In order to achieve this, we must look at the tendencies of the average visitor and integrate the advertisements as best as possible.

When the average user visits any web site, their eyes naturally drift to the top of the page and the left hand side column. Knowing this information, placing advertisements in these places would be the wisest choice for any web master. A good example of a site that places ads in the top of the site is www.sharedpcgames.com because they place a large banner at the top of the site. The links on the advertisements stand out naturally encouraging users to click on them. If you visit a web site that sells text links, it is often more expensive to place a text link in the header or on the left hand navigation opposed to the right hand side or in the footer.

Now that we know the best place to put ads, let’s talk about the actual ad placement and integration. The most valuable traffic to a web site is the traffic that comes from a search engine. If a user comes to a web site purely out of interest in that subject, then they will probably stay at your site for a longer time then someone who accidentally clicks on an advertisement for your site, or is deceived into visiting your site. Search engine visitors are the types of visitors that you want and they make up the majority of “average traffic.” If they are the average types of visitors, then let’s make our advertisements target them.

The best way to integrate advertisements is to make them appear as content. If the advertisements are targeted correctly, they will look like content, which will only encourage the user to click on the links. Additionally, another very good technique to use with ad integration is randomizing ads on the page. For example, if you have a table that has some data in it, rotating the data with the advertisements is a good place to get clicks. With the random rotation, users will not know where the ads are placed and are more likely to click on the advertisements. A very good example of this is www.pimpbreak.com. If you take a look at the advertisements on the front page, they are very well integrated with the site content and are completely randomized. I have seen a lot of different ad integrations, but this is probably by far, one of the best ones I have ever seen.

Wrapping up this short little article on applying amazing ad integration, I would like to end it by stating that the most successful ad integration is achieved by blending the advertisements with the web site content. When a user thinks that an advertisement is part of the sites content, they are much more likely to click on the advertisement and bring in more revenue for you.