For the past 2-3 months I have been 100% focused on building an ad network, while at the same time optimising adverts on my own websites so that I get the biggest return possible on my traffic (usually called maximum ecpm). Not only have I been using adverts that I have sold myself, I have been doing some affiliate work, and using adsense as well.
I have started to notice certain trends in how additional ad spots affect things.
For a beginner’s point of view to online advertising, what makes the most sense? More adverts mean more possible interest from users, more clicking, more revenue. The more adverts I display the more likely all my users see an ad they are interested in, and the more likely they are to click on adverts. Right? …wrong.
On my websites this is simply not sure.
Firstly I would like to seperate out my users into two different categories. Those who click on ads, and those who do not. Users do not tend to move from one group to the other. There seems to be a fairly finite amount of users who will click on adverts. What does this mean? Well, people who click on adverts are not much more likely to click on them because there are more of them. Its almost as if they will click on adverts whether there are lots of them or not.
From an actual user experience perspective, adverts are not that great either. Most people are blind to them, they take up space, they generally reduce the quality of the user experience. If we think along the lines of user experience, you are destroying it by having too many ads. And if you rely on Google for quite a bit of traffic, Google will know what you are doing, and will not like the face that you are sacraficing user experience for money. Except search traffic to fall.
Thirdly, most current ad networks work on a CPC bidding basis, and adverts that bid more are displayed more. This means that the more adverts you display, the less and less each advert you display is worth. Since I discussed earlier that some people will just click on ads, this means that having as many ads as possible can actually reduce income.
My suggestion is that as you start increasing your ad spots, initially it might increase revenue. But as you keep adding and adding them, the return you get gets lower and lower. Eventually, your revenues might actually start to fall as you keep adding more and more adverts.
