Using Multiple Ads

More dessert is a good thing. More money is a good thing. Sometimes, even
more people is a good thing. And guess what? More ads can be a good thing, too.
Wow. I’m channeling Martha Stewart. But unlike Ms. Stewart, I won’t get all
crafty on you, and I won’t tell you that multiple ads are a good thing, when
in fact, sometimes they’re not. I just want to convey that adding multiple ad
blocks to your Web pages can work well — if it’s done properly.
The appeal of multiples
Having multiple ads means more chances for site visitors to click your ads.
With that reasoning, many Web site owners who add AdSense to their pages
automatically put as many ads as they can on their Web site. Sometimes that
works for them; other times, it doesn’t.
When it does work, multiple ads may improve your AdSense revenue significantly
or maybe just a little. But what makes multiples work? In a word:
audience.
There are no hard and fast guidelines for what works and what doesn’t with
multiples. In every instance, it comes down to how your audience uses your
Web site and what kind of value they find in the ads that are displayed on
your page.
For example, I’ve played with a lot of different settings for the ads on my blog
in the process of putting this book together. One thing I did early on was to
increase the number of ads that were shown on my blog by tweaking the blog
template with code and by adding additional ad blocks using the widgets
provided by my blogging application provider, Blogger. (Widgets are like
mini-programs or additional capabilities within a program that you can add
or remove at will.)
Before those changes, I was generating a few dollars each day with my
AdSense ads. After the changes, the revenues dropped by a few cents each
day, and I even had a few days where I generated no income at all.
In my case, it seemed that adding more ads made visitors less likely to click
them. It may be the number of ads I chose to use, or it’s possible that I just
chose the wrong combination of ads. That’s what makes testing different
types, numbers, and configurations of ads so vitally important.
Using multiple ads — more than one ad unit per page — is usually a recommended
practice. Having multiples gives you the opportunity to catch your
site visitors in more than one location. It also allows you to include ads on
your site that may appeal to different audiences. For example, the site visitors
who are likely to click video ads may be a different set of visitors than
those who’ll click links or text ads. Figuring out the right configuration of
these ads just requires testing to see how your audience responds to each
type of ad.
Getting in the zone
In watching the revenue numbers for my site — in this case, the actual
earnings — I could see the results of the changes I made. Those results
reflected different zones that were successful for ads on my pages.
A zone is an area of your Web site that draws readers’ eyes. Most Web sites
have a header zone, a content zone, and a sidebar zone. Visitors focus on
each of those areas for a different reason.
The header zone is where visitors look to confirm what site they’re on. Later,
a visitor might look to the header zone to see if there are interesting or useful
links for them to follow.
The content zone is where visitors focus most of their attention. This is where
the main content of your site is found, and that’s what your visitors are looking
for. Content is first, links are secondary. Don’t get fooled, though. Links
may be secondary, but they’re still an important part of the site.
And that’s exactly why there’s also a sidebar zone. Sidebar zones are where
the cool stuff is usually found. Sidebars usually feature additional information
or links to other resources.
Multiple ads need to appear in one of these zones. Which zones, you ask?
I can’t tell you that. Try different configurations for all three zones to see
what works. Test, test, test. You know your visitors, and you can deduce
some facts about them and create theories for what will work. But until you
actually try a specific configuration, you’ll never know.
Avoiding overkill
One problem with using multiple ad blocks on your Web pages is that you
can quickly overdo it. A few ads can enhance the content on your page. Too
many make it look crowded and confusing. Visitors won’t know what to look
at first or which links to click.
If you have a blog service, you may be limited in the number of ads you can
show on a page for this very reason. Blogger, for example, limits publishers
to three instances of AdSense. You can place those three instances anywhere
on the page, but if you place more than three ads, something won’t show up.
So should you limit each of your pages to three or fewer ads? That depends on
your page and how well the ads integrate into the content and surrounding
elements of the page. Remember, the rule is still to make your ads as invisible
as possible. By making them invisible as ads, you’re making them visible as
content, meaning they’re more likely to attract the attention of visitors.
You don’t literally want to make your ads invisible. You could, too. Changing
the ads to make them blend completely into your background would certainly
do the trick. But then, how would visitors click the ads? No, the invisibility
superpower isn’t a good one to use in this instance. Just make your ads less
obviously ads.
Multiples don’t have to be identical
I’ve already alluded to this fact, but let me come right out and say it: Multiple
ads do not have to be identical. You can have one ad in your text and a different
kind of ad at the top of your page and another kind of ad in a sidebar, if
that’s what works for your Web site.
In fact, that combination — one in each zone — is probably the most successful
way to have multiple ad blocks on most pages. It won’t work with
every single Web site or even every single page on a Web site though.
When you’re configuring the ads for your site or blog, you may find that ads
work better on some pages and not others. That’s okay. If you have a page
where ads don’t perform well (or even at all), remove the ads from that page
and find a way to work in links to pages where ads do perform.
Play with the configuration of your ads. For my Google-Geek blog, what works
best are ads between the posts. In fact, ads at the top of the page and in the
sidebar don’t work at all — I’ve never been able to generate income from them.
Ads inside the posts also didn’t work for that blog, so I took them out. Ads
between the posts do work, though — but not all ads. A banner doesn’t perform
as well as link units do. It took a lot of testing for me to figure out these
facts about what ads work, where they work at, and how well they work.
When you’re testing your ads, be sure to try different configurations, but keep
in mind that you do have to keep track of what you’re trying and how well it
works. Keep a journal or a spreadsheet, or notes on a napkin if you have to.
But keep track of what you’re doing so that when it comes time, you can set
up your ads in a way that works best for you.
Also remember that with any kind of testing, what works today may fail you
tomorrow. Your site visitors may change, the topic of your site may expand
or narrow over time to suit your site visitors, and designs may get boring,
so you’ll need to re-do them. All I mean is that your ads might work really
well right now and not work at all two weeks from now or a year from now or
whatever timeframe you choose. It’s not that you’re doing anything wrong.
It’s just that things change. (You know the saying — there’s nothing constant
in this world except constant change.)
Testing isn’t a do-it-once-and-forget-it proposition. You do it again and again
and again, if necessary. Just remember, content gets stale, but so do ads.
AdSense helps with this because the ads that are shown on your page change
often. As your site matures, you may have to make more changes, so always
be watching your revenue levels to see when the tried-and-true ways start
becoming less effective.