The amount of revenue your website generates using Propeller Ads depends on several internal and external metrics. Factors such as fill rate, website bounce rate and traffic activity all have an impact on your website’s eCPM.
Where you place your ad units is another variable and generally makes the largest impact on how much money you earn. Using varied ad units, placing them in the right position and following our best practice tips can double your eCPM overnight.
If you’ve yet to do any ad placement optimisation, start by following these 7 tips to increase your daily revenue.
Place ads above the fold
In online advertising, above the fold refers to content that can be seen without the user having to scroll further down the page. For example, the image below shows everything on any webpage that is above the fold:
This is what every visitor will see when they land on our website unless they manually scroll down. According to SpikeHQ, only 40% of total website traffic view content below the fold:
Placing adverts above the fold ensures they receive more visibility and have a greater chance of engagement. Think about the user experience when placing ads above the fold, as too many ads will increase your bounce rate and hurt your website’s profits.
Google went on record to say that websites with too many above the fold ads may receive a Google penalty for doing so. Our suggestion is to limit your above the fold ad placements to a maximum of two ad units.
More is not always better
Website owners tend to think that the more ad units they place the more revenue they generate. Sadly it doesn’t work like that. Too many ads can ruin the user experience, decrease click-through rates of other ads and reduce your fill rate.
From our own experience and testing, we found that 3 ad units per page provides the best ROI for advertisers.
Pro-tip: Test a number of different ad units and compare the eCPM to find your magic number.
For most websites, the header, sidebar and footer have widgets that easily allow you to insert content and ads. Most websites have very little content in the footer and decide it’s a great section to place an advert. It’s not.
Given that most of your traffic will not make it to the footer of your website, adverts placed in the footer will receive a lower click-through rate.
Place ads in areas that receive a lot of attention such as blog posts,menu buttons, videos, images and elements of a site that traffic interact with. Using a heatmap tool is a great way to find which website elements users interact with most.
Bigger ad units convert better
Our 728×90 leaderboard provides advertisers a greater eCPM than our 468×60 leaderboard. Bigger ad units are visually dominating catching users’ attention and getting them to engage.
However, deciding on the theme and structure of your website, 728×90 banners may not render well or look out of place. At Propeller Ads we offer you several ad units in various sizes to ensure our ads work seamlessly with your website.
Check your ads render on mobile devices
Publishers are willing to spend more money to drive mobile traffic to their site. Having a mobile friendly website is essential when placing our ad units on your site to increase your eCPM.
Adweek confirmed that click-through rates on smartphone and tablet devices are higher than desktops for search, social and display networks:
Block web browser ad blockers
An ad blocker is an web browser plugin that automatically blocks adverts. It’s estimated that 41% of people aged between 18-29 use some sort of ad blocking software with that percentage rapidly rising.
Users who install ad blocking software will not see your ads reducing your potential revenue. To counteract that you should use a tool like Page Fair or Ad Blocking Detector if you have a WordPress website.
Test, test and test some more
No two website are ever same and what works for one, may not work for the next. The best way to optimise your ad units is to test them in various locations. Only after testing will you know which ad units traffic responds to best and how users interact with each page.
As a foundation to start your testing, follow our best practice guidelines for placing ad units as a starting point and start making minor adjustments from there.
Summary
If you follow our tips listed above you should expect to see your eCPM increase while providing a better user experience for visitors. The amount of revenue you generate using Propeller Ads depends on how much your visitors engage with your ad units.
You need to do everything possible to increase clicks by placing ads in highly desirable areas of your website. These 7 tips will get you started.
