The reason to place our ad-units on your website is to monetize your online business. The greater your eCPM, the greater your profits. But how do you increase eCPM?
In this article, we provide 7 easy to follow tips that will skyrocket your profits as a publisher.
Generate more traffic
Think of traffic like currency. The more traffic your website generates, the more you earn.
For example, let’s assume for every 1,000 visitors, 50 (5%) of them interact with your ads. These are 50 actions that help increase your overall profits, but what if your website received 10,000 visitors? That would result in 500 (5%) actions that increase your profits ten-fold. The more traffic you generate, the greater opportunity of earning a bigger daily revenue.
How to drive traffic? You can use everything for paid search, SEO, social media, emailing marketing, web forums to any other form of inbound or outbound marketing.
SE traffic yields the greatest eCPM
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of ranking articles and webpages in search engines to gain website exposure. SEO is an organic (free) method of driving traffic and triumphs all other forms of traffic generation in raising eCPM.
Studies have shown SEO to be the greatest inbound marketing method to generating leads:
Source: CMS Wire
“But what does this have to do with increasing eCPM?”
SEO provides searchers with websites they want to get quality content. When they find your website, they will read your articles and visit other pages. Visitors from search engines stay on your website for longer periods of time, resulting in greater ad interaction.
Social media
What makes social media a force to be reckoned with is the opportunity to drive traffic using free and paid methods. For example, creating a Facebook, Twitter or Instagram account and sharing content and URL links back to your website is free.
Then there’s paid methods such as promoting posts or tweets that are seen by more people, driving greater traffic to your website. According to Alexa, 3 of the top 10 websites are social media sites (Facebook, YouTube and Twitter).
Social media content can quickly go viral, it’s quite common to receive thousands of unique website hits in just a few days that will drastically increase your eCPM. Social sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are all places where sharing great content is the norm. If your content is rich in value and you can leverage the right hashtags and channels, you too can drive viral traffic to your website.
Here’s one website which simply posted their blog post on a number of Facebook groups and drove over 3,700 unique visitors in 48 hours:
Get a mobile friendly website
Is your website responsive for mobile devices? Google recently introduced a new change to their algorithm which is said to impact thousands of websites. Websites which aren’t mobile optimized are going to see a drop in traffic from Google which will negatively affect eCPM.
A study undertaken by Comscore revealed more users are accessing the Internet via mobile devices than desktops:
It’s not just Google you need to worry about, without a responsive website some of your ad-units may not be visible for mobile users, reducing your ad clicks and eCPM. Advertisers are willing to pay higher rates for mobile traffic, and it’s in your best interest to use mobile friendly websites to maximize eCPM.
Diversify your ad-units
We have no limitations on the amount of ad-units you can place on your website. We often advise publishers on using multiple monetization layers to maximize eCPM. For example, combine a number of Banner Ads with Pop-under Ads, or Slider Ads with Interstitial Ads.
Varied ad-units offer the best opportunity of converting as you have something that appeals to everyone.
Don’t have too many ad-units
This may sound counter-intuitive, but too many ads can be a bad thing. Placing several Banner Ads and having 3 or more Pop-under Ads will annoy your traffic and result in less interaction.
How many ads should you have? Run a few tests and see what returns the most optimal results. Every website is unique and has a different audience segment, you won’t know your magic number until you test.
Optimize your ad placements
If you decide to use our Banner Ads, click-through rate (CTR) is a pivotal aspect of increasing eCPM. CTR is the amount of clicks an ad receives per 1,000 impressions, the higher the percentage, the greater the profit. Optimization of Banner Ads can be the difference between achieving a 1% or 10% CTR.
While no two websites are ever the same, we have created a best practices for banner ads guide for our Banner, Slider and Layer Ads.
Summary
The secret to driving eCPM is traffic, website usability (is it mobile friendly?) and the optimization of ad-units. Nobody gets the perfect eCPM on their first ever attempt. Test a number of traffic methods to see which brings the highest quality of traffic, use various ad-units and make sure your website is optimized for mobile use.
Following these 7 useful tips is a great way to double or even triple your eCPM in weeks!
