When trying to make some money with your blog or other website, there are a few different kind of ads you can use. But how do you choose which kind of advertising to publish on your blog? It’s hard, I would even say impossible, to give good advise on which type of advertising anyone should put on their site for the best possible return. There simply isn’t a best solution that works for every website.
Finding the best monetizing strategy for your website involves a lot of testing and tweaking. You’d be amazed, how a seemingly insignificant change in your ad placement, can suddenly double your income. Before we can start tweaking our ad settings, though, we’ll have to sign up for some ad programs. There are many companies in online advertising and finding the right partner can be a difficult task by itself.
There are four major types of ads you can place on your website CPC, CPM, CPA and direct selling of ad spots for a fixed price per month. Most online advertising companies specialize in one of these methods, let’s have a closer look at the first option.
CPC/PPC
Cost-Per-Click or Pay-Per–Click ads will make you a little money each time a visitor clicks on an ad. The pay per click is generally very low, but with enough clicks this can add up to a nice income stream. Looking through my Google AdSense reports, I see many clicks that paid only 1 cent, but also some that paid a few dollars. When I add up all earnings and clicks, for the 4 years I’ve been using AdSense ads on many different websites, the average pay per click is about 10 cents, with single site averages between 2 cents and 85 cents.
The average pay per click, however, isn’t really interesting. What you want is the best possible total income, which normally is directly related to the number of visits to your site. This brings us to the better ad performance indicator: CPM or cost per thousand impressions. PPC ad programs usually show you the realized CPM value in your ad statistics. This makes it very easy to compare how well your PPC ads are doing compared to a CPM ad program. Google doesn’t allow publishers to share their ad stats, but I can tell you that my different websites, that have AdSense ads running on them, have a CPM ranging from 1 cent all the way up to $43. So, replacing the Google ads with a $2 CPM ad program would make sense for some sites, but not for all.
While with the impression based CPM ads earnings can only be raised by a rising number of visitors to your website, PPC ad revenue can easily be optimized by trying different ad placements and color schemes. PPC ad networks like Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network let you manage the color scheme and ad layouts for ads displaying on your website. While most sites benefit from trying to have the ads blend in with their content (i.e. using the same text and link colors as the main content of the website and not using a border around the ads) some sites make more revenue by using ads that are, well, less subtle.
Optimizing your PPC ads is an ongoing task. The ad settings that work best today might not bring in the most clicks next week, so it is important to keep tracking ad performance and try new settings regularly. The difficult thing with ad performance tracking is the interpretation of the results. Statistical data is only useful in big numbers. Tracking the ad clicks on 100 page views is hardly going to yield you any usable data. You need to look at the data for tens of thousands of page views. If your site isn’t pulling that kind of visitor numbers in, your ‘ad optimization’ is pretty much guess work.
A new social networking site is coming and even before the official launch it already has over half a million members! “How did they pull that one off?” you might ask. They are using some very clever viral marketing. Everyone that signs up is given some shares, which, according to them, will go up in price over the next few years. If you believe their numbers, your free signup bonus shares could be worth over a thousand bucks in a few years.
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