Thursday, April 19, 2007 at 12:12:50 PM
As some of you may have noticed, I've been playing around with the locations of the ads. Basically, what I'm trying to do is figure out where I can get the most number of ads in plain view, while at the same time not have them be way too in-you-face. I'm sure there is magical formula to this...I just have to figure it out. Which isn't going to be easy, but could be a lot easier if I could call on the SKarmy for its help.
Ok, so here's the deal. We need to be able to place as many ads on the page as possible--preferably above the point where you have to scroll down to see anything. I tried to put some things on the top of the page last night, but I received a few complaints about them, so I took them down. The reason that I am experimenting right now is because our click-through-rate on some of our ads is just too low. For clarification, the click-through-rate is a number that measures the frequency at which an ad is clicked by the visitors of a site.
The average CTR (click-through-rate) for a banner ad is somewhere between .1% and 1%. If a website is producing rates that are lower than the range, then it's considered to be an ineffective publisher. And if the rate is much higher than the average, then the automatic assumption is that something fishy is going on. Now I'm sure that some of you are thinking, "Hey, I'll just volunteer to click on some ads everyone once and awhile!" Unfortunately, that is not going to work. And the reason it won't is because advertisers want interested consumers, which is why there are gobs of ways to check for legitimate clickiness and advertising effectiveness. For example, if they start seeing that it's the same person that is clicking on ads over and over again, well, red flag. Or, if they see that the people who are clicking throug aren't staying for very long--another red flag. This is why it's best to simply try and figure out the best location for an ad and then just let human nature take over.
So how about this. I'll list below all of the different ad-sizes that we work with, and maybe some of you can reply in a comment what you think is best as far as placement of the ads goes. I'll assign each ad a name so that everyone knows what everyone else is talking about when you go to describe your game plan. So here we go...
Skyscraper - these are the tall and skinny ads that are on both sides of the homepage
Big Box - these are the large square boxes that are in between the two text areas of the homepage
Banner - this is the smaller ad at the bottom of the page
Leaderboard - this is the larger ad that is at the bottom of the page
So this is basically a layout question. Where can we place these ads so that they are in plain view as soon as someone comes to the site, yet aren't really obtrusive. And another thing to keep in mind is that you really shouldn't have to scroll down to see these ads--just one of the rules that we have to abide by. (I know that some of the ads are pretty low right now, but I'm only keeping them up so that everyone can see all of the options.)
And here's an interesting little tidbit--the Big Boxes make Search Kindly a pretty good amount of money...but they never get clicked on. Go figure.
I'm really looking forward to all of your ideas.
