During ASE (Affiliate Summit East) I spoke with several site owners who were concerned about overwhelming their visitors with advertisements. I think this is probably a question that is asked often: “How much is too much?” At what point do advertisements deter visitors from coming back? The answer really depends on what kind of traffic we’re talking about. Let’s look at a few types of traffic and the typical behavior of those visitors.
Organic
Search Engine traffic typically has a very high bounce rate (70-90% in my experience). It matters very little how many ads are on a page for this type of traffic, in fact, I would encourage you to try to monetize organic traffic in every way possible. Visitors from search engines are usually looking for an answer to a question (unless it’s e-commerce and then you shouldn’t have ads on your site to begin with) and if they arrive at your site, they’ll typically stay for less than a minute and never come back. Why wouldn’t you try to get them to leave your site via an advertisement? Show them large ads (336×280 & 728×90) above the fold and focus on contextual. The more relevant to what they are looking for, the more likely they are to click.Referral
Visitors arriving from other sites have one of the lowest bounce rates (typically less than 50%) and therefor are much more likely to stick around. This type of traffic should be treated differently than organic traffic and as such should see fewer advertisements. Using basic conditional statements in your forum software, or in whatever language your site is programmed in, you should be able to turn off ads for anyone who didn’t arrive via a search engine. This will improve your bounce rate even more and encourage your referral traffic to register/return.PPC/Advertising Campaigns
This type of traffic comes from AdWords and other advertising campaigns. It’s a bit of a grey area and you’ll have to experiment with what works best. My personal philosophy is “once and ad clicker, always an ad clicker” so if they clicked an ad to get to your site, you may want to push your call to action (i.e. “Join Today”) up higher, but still have ads in case they want to leave. But you may also want to remove the ads so you don’t risk losing a visitor you paid money for. Bounce rates for PPC campaigns can vary depending on the landing page, so do a little A/B testing and see what works best for your paid traffic. Again, use a simple conditional to show/hide ads for this type of traffic based on the referrer.Direct/Members
Type-in or bookmark traffic has the lowest bounce rate (usually less than 20%) and should be provided the best experience with the least amount of intrusive ads. This would include registered members and word of mouth traffic. Giving these users the absolute best experience possible is important and will encourage them to return again and again.
You may cut in to your bottom line a little at first, but the end result of improving the overall experience for your visitors will help grow your site and your bottom line. Make sure you are using a good analytics tool (like Google Analytics) to track conversion rates, bounce rates, average depth and length of sessions, and return rate. If you can monitor this data and continuously test you’ll find the perfect balance of advertising for your site.
About the Author
Chris Kenworthy is the owner of MediaGroup1 LLC and Dream.In.Code, a popular programming and web development community. Chris has been earning online since 2001 and recently began consulting with forum and community owners to help monetize and improve their web sites. He received a degree in Web Technology in 2005 and is a certified Google Advertising Professional. For more information and to contact Chris directly, visit his blog at http://www.ackfoo.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Forum Building, Monetization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Nathan Says:
vBulletin of course… although I guess either would do (OR BOTH). THANKS
skyhawk133 Says:
I don’t know vBulletin well enough, so I’ll give you a quick piece that will work for Google.
// take the referer
$thereferer = strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']);
// see if it comes from google
if (strpos($thereferer,"google")) {
// show your ad
}
Emducks Says:
on July 23rd, 2007 at 11:34 pm
Well written and insightful. Thanks for pointing me to this–Emily
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Nathan Says:
on July 18th, 2007 at 7:55 pm
Care to share the code to show certain ads to search engine traffic only?