Targeted Traffics is the Key

To boost up your ad revenue, first you need to bring in targeted traffics to your site. How? The keys here are great content and effective marketing strategy. I will have another articles to talk about this. For now, let’s focus on how to monterize and then optimize the revenue from your traffics. Here is the summary of the important points I got from a nice article authored by Pat McCarthy.

1. Sell targeted ads
   • Provide "Advertise with us" link on your site and gives out statistics and uniqueness to attract advertisers in your industry to sign up. This help you to eliminate the middleman like Google. The problem for this approach is the effort needed to reach out the potential advertisers in the first place. You may consider to hire a company to do this for you or use automated services like Adbrite, AdEngage, Adster and Adify.
2. Work with multiple ad networks
   • AdSense is good but it doesn’t tell you the math behind. You have no idea whether you already maximize the revenue. You may want to try out more ad networks to see who gives you the most. However, it is always a headache to manage them. RightMedia looks like provide a good solution because it establishes an open marketplace for ad exchange. On top of that, it helps you to determine which ad network to use on the fly based on the statistics generated from your site.
3. Pick the right type of ads (contextual ads, display ads and etc)
   • Experiment it yourself because there is no fixed rule here. To me, video ads may indirectly enrich the content of your site if the video ads are related.
4. Test different ad location and size
   • This is more the result from the user behaviorial studies. The guidelines that you may hear like ads should be above the fold, integrated in content, or placed according to an advertising heat map. However, the result varies with different layouts of your site. I suggest you find the best combination from experiments.
   • You can create your own heat map for your site using the services from ClickDensity and CrazyEgg.
5. Work with different ad pricing models (CPC, CPM, CPA and etc)
   • This helps you earn more money by opening your site up to more advertisers, and more competition from advertisers can drive your overall rates and revenue up. It’s easiest if you use an ad management tool that allows you to accept multiple types of pricing deals and allocate your inventory appropriately.