General question: How do you gauge the effect adding more ads to your site has on visitor experience, loyalty, stickiness, etc? I really struggle with this question and would love some help, discussion, or pointers to experts that can help me answer this question. Let's say you run Google AdSense to monetize your site and Analytics to track what peeps are doing. You want them to click the ads to make money, but you also don't want them bouncing off your site and not coming back... since AdSense opens in the same window, who's to say the visitors will navigate back to your site? The real question: How do you determine and find the perfect balance between monetizing your traffic and creating something that will be sticky? From what I understand, you can't really use changes in bounce rates, time on site, etc. The problem: the more people click and the sooner they click, the higher your bounce rates and the lower your time on site / pages per visit would be. So, do you exchange these bad things for better monetization? If so, how do you find when the balance is so you aren't shooting yourself in the foot for longer term growth? Hopefully that makes sense and hopefully there are some monetization, Google Analytics, and visitor experience experts out there that can help me out. Thanks!
It really depends on your short and long term goals. I never place adsense on a site until I reach a certain traffic goal - ads can turn people off and keep them from bookmarking or linking to a site if it looks like a MFA site. People who are repeat visitors will tend to become "ad blind" - so if the goal is to make money via adsense, then in an ideal situation, your bounce rate is likely going to be high. If your goal is to build a high traffic site, then a lot of people don't run adsense because they see it as getting rid of a visitor for a few cents. If you want both, you would probably want to make sure you aren't overdoing ad blending.
Thanks for the reply and the thoughts. To date I felt I've been doing a great balance with both long term traffic and short term monetization. Actually, if anything I've been overly cautious about it and have always erred on the side of long term growth. With that said, last week I added an AdSence ad to a very prominent above-fold spot and my monetization shot up, but I haven't yet seen any changes in bounces, time on site, pages per visit, etc. So, now I'm wondering if I've been / am leaving money on the table since it seems people are clicking the ads, but it isn't having a negative impact on my stats. I guess my big questions are: 1) Am I measuring things properly? What stats should I be looking at / comparing and how? 2) Do I keep adding more and more ads until I see changes in my stats? 3) Even if I DO see slight changes in my stats... at what point is it a "bad thing"?
I think there is no absolute "right" answer. You need to figure out a balance that you are happy with. You could also do split testing, without ads vs with ads, or ads with different placements. The better your content, the more forgiving your visitors will be when it comes to ads. My bests site enjoy a very good ctr with increasing traffic - but these sites are category killers that took years to build. The visitors option is to put up with ads that are blended well but don't scream "ad site" - or settle for an inferior site. My goal is to get them to click an ad - not have a low bounce rate. I place no ads on the home page, but all other pages have 1 to 2 ads blocks. This has worked very well for me.
Yup, I think you're definitely correct... no "one size fits all". My main site is #1 for the niche and my stats are generally really good. My content and community are generally really sticky so I doubt I'll see much impact from the additional ads I've been putting up. I think the main problem I'm going to have from this process: I'll be kicking myself for not adding the placements sooner. Any other tricks / tips for what and how to measure and track the non-monetary effects of the new ads (besides split testing)?
Wow!!! I just got an email from my hero of Analytics; Avinash Kaushik. He's the "Analytics Evangelist at Google" and author of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/ Here is what he said: The guy is a super genius! I've really loved reading his blog posts at his own blog and also at the Google Analytics blog (also great videos): http://analytics.blogspot.com/