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Monetizing Traffic - Optimizing Ad Revenues
By Max | June 3, 2007
This month I want to increase my revenues. There are a few things I am going to do which I think will boost the earnings of my sites. Getting more traffic is a very difficult thing. It is far easier to increase the monetization of existing traffic. This doesn’t always include increasing the number of ad impressions.
1. On my forum site, I currently only display google adsense ads to the registered users. There is just one ad unit on the page, the 728×90 adsense block. Because the registered users tend to visit the site regularly, they have likely seen all the google ads before. They are over exposed to these ads. It will be far more efficient for me to show them the TribalFusion banners in the same spot. Right now the CPM for that google ad site is substantially lower than my average TribalFusion CPM. This will be a pretty easy change to make, and I hope to get it up tomorrow. Running the google ads in this spot has been averaging about $2.44 per day. The CTR is very low as well. This ad unit gets about 10,000 impressions per day. I think with the CPM ads there, I will earn about $5/day at a minimum.
2. Currently, TribalFusion cannot supply all of my banner inventory. They display no ad when they can’t fill a spot. This costs me money. Fortunately, they will accept what ever code I give them to use instead of a blank ad when they can’t fill the inventory. I am going to set it up so that the blank ads default to another ad network. I had hoped to use another CPM network, but Casale and ValueClick don’t accept forum sites. I’ll look around for another one. Perhaps Burst does. Until I figure that out, I’ll just display my google ads as the default. This should generate some additional revenue.
3. There are also probably a couple more spots where I can place some more ads, that won’t degrade the user experience too much. I’ll probably be adding a couple more ad locations to the site.
4. I want to learn to use OpenAds (phpAdsNew). This will be useful for selling ad space directly to advertisers which I would like to get started. Ad networks are extremely useful because they can fill most of your inventory easily. However, cutting out the middle man when selling ad space can really boost incomes. If there are a few advertisers who I can easily sign up, that would really boost the bottom line. How does one find these advertisers? The obvious place is just to look and see who is displaying ads on your site through the current ad networks. Contact them directly. They will most definitely be interested in saving a little money.
5. I want to experiment with some additional ad networks. Specifically, I want to sell some text link ads and sponsored postings. ReviewMe and Text-Link-Ads are the major players in these categories. Text-Link-Ads can be very lucrative if you can get some loyal advertisers. Of all the types of advertising, I think text-link-ads can be the hardest to sell. I believe this is because the ROI just doesn’t justify the current prices people are charging. Its a supply problem. There is almost unlimited inventory of text ads, but I’ll save that argument for another post.
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July 1st, 2007 at 12:21 pm
[…] also had a few plans to increase my website earnings last month. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to accomplish everything on the list. Out of the […]