I'm completely new to the marketing scene...and I believe my earnings would back that up! I bought two websites that had no Ads/earnings associated with them but had a decent amount of traffic. One site sees 400-500UVs a day with 600-800PVs daily, and the other site has 3000-4000UVs a day with 8000-9000PVs daily. My question is, I've been trying different services and different placements of the Ads over the past 2-3 weeks...How long should I let a "trial" ad sit on the site before trying something else? Right now, I've been swapping ads every 3-4 days, and I'm curious if that's hurting me...? I've tried things like Adsense, Adbrite, Amazon, Affiliate only ads, etc... Any thoughts of length of time to try a method would be much appreciated!
My own basis would be a month.If i see good results on my ads then will continue it.If not then it's time to try new ways.
Well this really depends. What type of ad network are you using? Ad Sense or some sort of affiliate marketing?
Roughly one half to one percent of a site's visitors will click on ads. The site that has 3,000 to 4,000 daily visitors, roughly 15 or so will click on the ads. If you don't see that in your first few days, take 'em down and try different ones. No sense leaving them up for more than a week. A tip, though: Put most of your ads starting in the middle of your pages, going down. Top ads don't get clicked on as much.
I have been trying a combination of adsense and affiliate marketing. This is what I am seeing for an ad placement at the bottom of the page (affiliate marketing ad): Impressions: 4584 Unique: 1984 Clicks: 6 CTR: 0.13% So maybe the better question is how do you assess if an ad is doing well. I guess if 0.50% is a good ad, maybe this one is underperforming? The other metric would be conversions? I've had 0 conversions thus far (ad's been running for a week). Should I change the ad or wait a bit longer? With my adsense on the other site, I'm saw: Impressions: 444 Clicks: 1 CTR: 0.23% $$: Couldn't even afford a gumball...
First of all, where is your traffic coming from? Is it targeted traffic or do folks end up there by accident? How is the content on your sites? Since you bought them, there is a good chance someone built those sites to make a few bucks and probably used article spinners for the content. People come to a site for a reason. Usually, looking for information or an answer to a problem. They don't come there to click on ads. How many ads are on your sites? Do they make the page look trashy? You will find that a few "well placed" ads will bring better results then a page filled with tons of banners, ads, etc. I recommend putting your adsense in the top fold of your page. Of course you need to blend them into your site. It depends on how your site is layed out. If it doesn't look good in the top fold, try it to the right, but still on top. For Adsense, you can leave them there forever and not worry why people aren't clicking on them. It really is hard to help without seeing the site.) Finally, if the ads are not relevant to your content, of course nobody will click on them.
Traffic is organic, and return visitors. My guess is that 80-90% is targeted traffic. Content is not really original, but remains 100% unique but enough to draw (return) visitors. Not many ads on the site...I think they are placed discretely. Here is the links to the sites: (note: I am passing them through my blog for a redirect to prevent google indexing to here) Ads on left sidebar and right sidebar, plus ads at bottom of each post...(Most visitors link directly to a post, via social bookmarking) Low traffic one -> http://showyourgeek.com/offbeat Ads at the bottom of each post...(Most visitors link directly to a post, via a search engine) High traffic one -> http://showyourgeek.com/wowsite Any comments or suggestions greatly welcomed!
Great news site. I really like that one!! This is going to be tough. You did a great job with the Google ads and the pc scan. People coming to your site are interested in your news items so they are not really targeted to anything specific. So, your PC ad is a good one. Everyone needs pc stuff so I would leave that one alone, or maybe change it after a month to another pc type ad or affiliate program. I don't care for the Amazon thing and would dump it quick.) What you might do there is look into the CPA stuff. There are some good posts here in DP about CPA. People love to take surveys, maybe you could fit one in there somehow. Your other site is good too. The only thing you could do with that is try to throw up some WOW affiliate stuff. I think CB has a few products. I don't think adsense would go good there, but you never know. Not much help. Maybe google for other wow sites and see what they are doing. Good luck!! Zeek
I actually just put up the amazon deal thing yesterday. I had a Pre-order Windows 7 for 50% off there, that was doing nothing (it was also an amazon ad). I'll have to look into CPA, haven't tried much of that. I like the survey idea, seems like it might be a good fit for a random news site. I had CB products with a keyword of Warcraft running for a week. No conversions. Not sure if I was too impatient or not...The current ad running is an affiliate ad for a gold seller (high reputation). Getting close to ready to yank that one, haha! Most WoW sites seem to sell advertising space....maybe I should just go with the flow.