How to Maximize Ad Revenue on a Website

This article will mostly discuss placement techniques for contextual advertising that can dramatically raise your revenue from clicks. Contextual advertisers include Yahoo Publisher Network, Google, and Adbrite. These ads usually display a link followed by some description text or the url of the link.

Steps :

1. Make sure you place the ad correctly. Ads that people can’t see won’t be clicked on, so make sure the ads are located in a prime spot that will generate interest. The best spots for an ad is on the top fold of the webpage, meaning the viewer can see the ad without having to scroll. But not on the very top, msot people don't look there
2. Consider linking text. This helps to make the ad stand out more and gives a better chance for the viewer to actually read the ads. Secondly, since the ads are embedded within the text, it’s harder for the viewer to miss. Ads located on the sides are oftentimes looked over, which is exactly what you don't want visitors to do.
3. Put small, relevant images next to your ads. This has been show to increase ad revenue because this attracts attention to the ads, and people are tricked into thinking that the picture is content related to the ad. Google Adsense allows this method (somewhat, however, some images placed next to ads can violate Google TOS, ask Google before adding images next to ads), however Yahoo Publisher Network does not allow it. Read the TOS on certain publishers to get more info on whether this is allowed or not.
4. Make the ads relevant. The best part of contextual advertising is that the ads are relevent to your site (Adbrite does not have this feature, they just put up generic network ads). Google and Yahoo both target their ads decently well, but Google Adsense definitely has the best ads that are relevant to your site. To increase ad relativity, make sure the keywords that you want ads for are repeated throughout. For example, if you wanted to display ads related to “making money” you would repeat the phrase making money many times on my page. If you want to be making money, and making money is what you want, then make sure that you are making money by implementing these ads well. It’s also best to spread your keywords throughout the page instead of concentrated in one area like above.
5. Keep to one theme. This kind of ties in with making your ads relevent, but make sure your website concentrates one one certain type of category. For example, GameSpot.com is a site that focuses on games, while IGN.com has sections over games, movies, comics, cars, etc. GameSpot, if they used Google Adsense, would be serving the most relevent ads - gaming ads. While IGN, if they used Google Adsense, would be serving ads about all sorts of things because they have so many sectors. If a gamer goes on IGN and sees an ad about Japanese Movies, they probably won’t be enticed to click. Of course, these statements are just theoretically speaking, the main point is that if your website is focused on one topic, the ads will be better served to your target audience. If you have a website that covers many things, it will be harder to generate ads that interest your users.
6. Do your research. Each publisher allows you to create separate channels for your ads so you can track how each individual ad unit is doing. Look over your ads and see which ones are performing the best, and then make a judgement as to which ads you should keep and which ones you should alter or get rid of. Constantly looking over your statistics is a key factor to increasing your ad revenue.

Increase Website Hits

First, let's take a hypothetical tour of the process of measuring website traffic. Imagine Hypothetical Jim visiting the home page of a new website he learned about on Google.com. Hypothetical Jim visits the home page, then visits the "About Us" page, which he bookmarks. Later, Hypothetical Stu visits the home page, then leaves the site. Later that evening, Hypothetical Jim returns to the "About Us" page using his bookmark, and clicks on the link to the "Contact Us" page. After looking over the page, he leaves the site.

From the text description above, you can determine that: (1) the site has had 2 unique visitors, Hypothetical Jim and Hypothetical Stu; (2) the site has had three unique visitor sessions (two for Jim and one for Stu); and (3) the site has had 5 pageviews (4 by Jim and 1 by Stu). You may wonder wether to count Hypothetical Jim's second visit to the "About Us" page as a second pageview. Count it.

What you cannot determine from the description above is the number of website hits. A hit is measured every time a specific unique file (HTML files, image files, script files, frames, etc.) is downloaded. In other words, many people refer to the total number of HTTP Requests a user makes as the number of hits the site receives. Since a single web page can be made up of any number of unique files (hundreds even), measuring hits is often meaningless in measuring the success of a website.

In this hypothetical example, the homepage consists of 24 files, so web analysis software will count 24 hits every time a visitor downloads the home page. There are 21 total images, 1 script, and one CSS file (plus the index html file itself). The "About Us" page consists of 14 files, so web analysis software will count 14 hits. There are 11 images, 1 script, and one CSS file (plus the about html file itself). The same goes for the "Contact Us" page.

As you can see, website hits do not consistently correlate with unique visitors, sessions, or pageviews. The only reason to look at hits is to measure the number of HTTP requests that a browser has to make in order to view your page. Generally speaking, the larger the hit count, the slower the download. For that reason, it is best to reduce the number of hits/page until the download speed is optimized.

Savvy media buyers ignore webmasters who claim to have thousands of hits. They measure pageviews, user sessions, and unique and return visitors.