Making Money From Adverts

You have a website that's getting lots of visitors and you feel that you would like to get a bit of cash for all of the hard work you put in. There are two options that you have, either make people pay for a certain service on your website or put adverts on. Don't feel that you have to make your mind up between these two things though, you could easily do both. This tutorial gives a little help on what types of adverts are around and which and how to put them on your website.

Types of Advert

In terms of types of adverts there are two things that vary. The visual style of the adverts and how you get money for the advert.

First, visual styles and we shall start with the worst. Pop-up ads. I'm sure you have been annoyed by popups sometime so why would you want to put your visitors through the same. Also a lot of people nowadays have popup blockers which will prevent the adverts being shown. Popups are rapidly going out of date as advertisers begin to realise that if somebody has clicked on a popup, chances are that they won't really be so interested in the product they are trying to advertise. Collectively we call this how targeted the traffic from the ad is. If the visitors are, in general, interested in the topic then the advertiser will be promoting their product more effectively and can therefore pay more for each visitor.

Banner ads do stand out and so will probably be noticed and maybe clicked on by visitors. If you have a nice looking site then these could make it look not so nice. There tend to be quite high click through rates with banner ads but the traffic is not too targeted.

Text ads have gained in popularity fast over recent years. They don't stand out that much because they are just text so they may not be noticed as much by visitors. The benefit of them is that they don't wreck your website's look if you position them well and also because the visitors can read a little description they will know what they are going to. This means well targeted traffic. Also there are often several in a block giving the visitor a choice of sites to choose.

There are really four types of ways you can get money from an advert.

The first doesn't have any mass signup schemes to my knowledge. Its is basically the advertiser paying you a fixed monthly amount to show their advert. This probably won't happen for your site unless it is very large as an advertiser needs to know about your sites popularity and how many times and where you will show their advert before the can really offer this.

Pay Per Impression is where you get paid for the amount of times that you show the advert. This is often measured per thousand impressions. This is similar to the one above because the advertiser want to be sure of the placing of adverts on your website and they could well want to know a little about it to get an idea of how many visitors they might be getting.

Pay Per Click is where you get paid for every time somebody clicks on an advert. These are widespread and there are many mass signup schemes. This is currently the most popular type. The advertiser is assured of visitors for their money so they can pay reasonable amounts.

Pay Per Commission is where you get paid every time the advertiser sells a product to a customer who has clicked on your advert. These tend to be run more by the individual companies than large coordinators. These can be known as referral schemes. You could well get quite a generous cut of the sale as the advertiser has been guaranteed the money from the sale in return for the advertising. These ads tend to be quite customisable with some letting you use a url to link to with any format advert you feel like.

Getting some adverts

I only know of pay per commission and pay per click advertisers, both of these being quite common. The main pay per click advert providers are:

Google Adsense provides both text and banner services but they are better known for their text. They are very reliable and provide highly targeted adverts due to a large number of people wishing to advertise.

Chitika provide adverts which are product based. They can be used alongside google Adsense as long as you set them to non-contextual mode. These are only suitable for some websites as they purely advertise products for sale.

Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) is a newer and smaller provider. They are similar to Google but the adverts are generally less relevant because of the smaller number of advertisers. This is still in Beta so it could well grow.

Amazon provide advertising for their products. You can choose which product to advertise so if you recommend a specific product on your website this could well be a good idea.

Pay per commission has a lot of small companies which will offer you money or services in return for commissions or referrals. Google Adsense has a small commission section.

Placing Adverts

There is a balance between making the adverts noticeable and having them disrupt your website. You will have to consider what you are trying to do with your website. Do you really need the money or do you want to provide a good resource for people?

Below is a diagram which shows where adverts tend to get most clicks (darker is more clicks).



Just about the worst places to put adverts are at the very top and bottom. Neither get many visitors and an advert across the top of your page really spoils the looks. A top advert will usually be skimmed over and a bottom won't be reached.

The left hand side is generally weaker than the right (something to do with parts of your brain) except for the top left where navigation usually goes. Ads placed on either side are not very obtrusive but similarly visitors aren't going to notice them to click on.

Adverts placed into the main content do well especially if they are blended in. This is because visitors will naturally read them. If they are not placed badly in the content they are hardly noticeable to the page in general and shouldn't affect visitors too much.

It has been found that on article based sites adverts at the end of the content do well as the visitor will have finished reading the article. If the advert is partway through then they may not want to interrupt their reading.

You most definitely should not put adverts in places where they get in the way as visitors tend to have a tendency to skim over them or just leave your site because they don't like it.

Colour and Style

The shape of your advert largely depends on where you want to put them. In general wider adverts do better.

The colour of the advert is a big factor. The current consensus seems to be that they should fit in. This said there do seem to be a few sites where contrast works for them. If you are not sure why not experiment. With most advertising programs you can track different ads (Channels in Adsense) so you can see what works best.

Keywords

The way that most adverts from large advertising networks work is that the person who bids most for a particular keyword gets their adverts shown the most. If an advertiser bids too low then they won't get their advert shown enough times. This is of course a supply and demand issue. If there are more people wanting to advertise than show adverts then the price get boosted as people bid higher and higher to get adverts shown. However if the number of people showing the adverts rises then the people wanting to have adverts shown will discover that they can get enough clicks with a lower bid so the price drops. This is not spread over the entire network as the ads are targeted to the right pages. Therefore differences in prices of different keywords arise.

This phenomenon has lead to the rise of websites which list high paying keywords. Unfortunately this is a bit self destructive because as people see one keyword is high they make a page for that keyword, creating advertising space and dropping the price.

Recently google released a tool that was previously only available to advertisers, to the public. This gives information about keyword popularity and the rough bid price and raking for certain keywords. I would definitely recommend looking at this tool as it is fascinating just to see popularity etc. Unfortunately it is a bit vague but then again google wouldn't want to give too much away. Google Keyword Tool.

Google Smartbids

If life wasn't complicated enough already google had to introduce a quite revolutionary system to make sure their customers were getting value for money. The new system takes many factors about your website and the keyword and works out how much to pay you. The main message that they are trying to get across to you is to make a good quality website with lots of content. The factors that they are rumoured to have taken into account are the click through rate of your website, the number of page views, the pagerank of your site (google estimate of its importance), the keywords popularity and how relevant the advert is to your pages content. Like most of the time with google they keep their algorithms behind locked doors so that people can't abuse the system.

Making your mind up

First consider your visitors when you are considering placing adverts on your page. After all its them who will be clicking on the adverts so if you drive them away it's your loss.

I highly recommend Google Adsense as a good paying with highly targeted adverts, a good variety of styles and even custom colours. They have a nice control interface with lots of tracking options. Just make sure you keep to their terms and conditions because the have a reputation for being strict.



Consider things carefully and don't be afraid to test things to see if they work for you.