(Photo: Cody Ho assuming photo responsibilities for Phoebe Ho)I can understand throwing away a penny here and there, but it would be pretty ridiculous to toss out hundreds of dollars every day. This is how I feel about optimization. There are many simple ways to increase revenue, but publishers often overlook how easy it is to make changes. Take the case of one publisher, who tried changing his 468x60 banner to a 300x250 rectangle and saw his revenue double! Afterwards, of course, he regretted not making the change earlier.
My goal is to make sure you don't have the same regret when you realize you could have already made extra money -- if only you'd optimized sooner. So in order of "biggest bang for the buck," here goes:
1) Make sure your colors are appropriate for your site and ad location. It's the easiest change to make that can increase your revenue up to 4x!
2) When choosing formats, remember: "Wider is better." Though you always want to be sure the format fits into the space on your pages, use 160x600 instead of 120x600 and try using rectangles as much as you can. 336x280 and 300x250 are our best performing formats. And since they support image and video ads, you'll even have more advertisers bidding on these ad spaces than other formats.
3) Like Geoff said earlier this week, "Set your site on fire!". Make sure you place the ads where your users will see them. This is why "above the fold" is so popular, because most users will not scroll below the fold line. In the same way, people often look for menu bars on the left side of a page so ads in that location are "hot." If your design layout allows it, sandwich the ads with content: placing a rectangle in the middle of a long article not only helps your visitors read those ads, but it also gives them a visual break.
Just try these tips -- it may take you 5 minutes or an hour, but you'll never know until you do if they will make you even more money. What have you got to lose?
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