8 Tips: Boosting Ad Revenue through Web Design's Good Practices

8 Tips: Boosting Ad Revenue through Web Design’s Good Practices

Updated on October 22nd, 2014 by Quertime Writer in Make Money Online

Online ad revenue has become the major source of revenue for many websites. Advertising is very profitable for websites that enjoy heavy traffic. Bloggers and various websites like news websites publish ads and generate enough income to provide a boost to their bottom line.

For most of the online businesses ad revenue is important for their success and hence website designers should be able to design and develop websites which can produce revenue. Proper ad optimisation, in terms of ad’s style, position and type, is must for revenue generation. Given below are some practices that can boost ad revenue when properly applied:

Select Ad Position

Ads should be placed in places where high chances exist for visitors to notice and read them. Some of the prominent places are:

Around the top-left/top-right part of the page under the site logo
At the bottom of an article with long body
Below the post title
In between the post content

The layout of the website should be such that ads look like a part of the design and not look out of place.

Select Proper Size of Advertisement

It has been observed that wide ads are easy to read as compared to narrow ones. In a wide format, readers can comfortably read more text in one go and they don’t have to skip a line and return to the left margin after every few words.

Narrow ads like skyscrapers of size 120×600, can fit into narrow spaces but the supply of available display ads is very limited for this ad size. That is the reason; this may lead to sub-optimal ad performance and not work in your favour.

Even though web designers should always use an ad size that complements their website page, several sizes like 336×280 (Large rectangle), 300×250 (Medium rectangle), 728×90 (Leaderboard) and 160×600 (Wide skyscraper) have been found to be very effective in performance. One should position these ads effectively so that it helps to increase the earnings.

Select Styling

For better performance it is recommended that the colour scheme and style of your website should be such that it is able to blend in the ad. One should prefer ads without background colour and border for better results as compared to ads within borders and with background colour.

Consider the Future Scope of the Website

A web designer should discuss and consider the future plan of the website with the client in the initial stage itself. Most websites start out with few ads and slowly as they gain popularity and audience, the chances of generating more ad revenue increases. If it is taken care of in the design process itself and dedicated slots are provided to incorporate future ads, it can potentially save a designer from redesigning an entire website.

A designer can hold some spots temporarily with some website-specific content until they are needed for ads in future. Along with the client, a designer should also make an effort to analyse the impact of ads on the visitors. An ad should appeal to visitors in terms of its suitability and should be in context of the website.

Select the Type of Advertisement

The type of ad also plays a big role in deciding the kind of ad revenue one can generate. If the ad type is text or banner then there is a high probability that it will show both text and banner ads in accordance with the keywords in the article. That’s why text/banner ads are considered best in the performance as compared to other types of ads and a designer should incorporate text and banner ads in the design to enhance ad revenue.

Optimise the Web Traffic

One of the best ways to increase traffic for your website is to update its content regularly. If the site is rich in content, it will definitely help in getting more traffic. It is recommended that a designer put an AdSense unit on all the content pages of the website to optimise the traffic, thereby increasing the chances of generating more ad revenue.

Use Keywords to Enhance Web Pages

Google AdSense advertising is based on keyword targeting, and therefore, it bases its topics on the content of your website. This implies that websites which have content-rich pages of a popular topic will attract more ads and thereby generate more ad revenue.

It is advised to check the keyword density before one serves ad on a web page. It is easy to find the most effective keyword of a page using free and advanced tools like SEO Density Analyser. A designer should give enough importance to these keywords and use them in building theme-based content for the website. Also, the designer should put an effort to get the keywords into the anchor text of the incoming links.

Revenue Optimisation

Since AdSense gets the ads based on the keywords of your website; sometimes Google creates crawl errors for the same purpose. These errors need to be fixed and the quality of the site should be improved for enhancing the performance of ads. Revenue optimisation is the process for the same, that is, it modifies the site and ads to improve the traffic and quality of your website and thus increases the performance.

Apart from the practices mentioned above, the designers can place a custom search engine on the site to help users with the search and this might let them earn from relevant ads on the result page. Designers should also keep themselves updated regarding the trends in ads and designs to get the maximum benefit. Also, one can promote good practices and avoid bad ones like manually modifying AdSense code and clicking on own ads. Employing cloaking, asking others to click on your ads and placing Google ads on prohibited sites should also be avoided.

Although ad revenue is a major concern for every website owner, it does impact the web designers as well, and they should take advertising needs into consideration in the design process in order to maximise ad revenue.

Author: Tanuj Rastogi

Tanuj Rastogi, the director of Sigma Infotech and A Website Designer, not only provides cheap web development services to his clients, but also shares educative resources to help them find a good web designer. He is also well-versed in web maintenance and support.