ADVERTISEMENTS: How Much Is Too Much?

How Not To Scare Away Visitors & Advertisers

[chipdouglas]

I am about to put up a very clean and professional-looking site that would seem almost naked without side banners and insets for featured widgets. I think I have found a very lucrative niche with highly targeted buyer-visitors that would attract plenty of advertisers.

In fact, the only competition does not advertise and gets only ~100k uniques/mo but is offering a few flat-rate ads for $1000-$3000/mo--AND THEY'RE BOOKED SOLID MONTHS OUT. Their site is not clean-looking: there is WAY too much going on and the homepage has only a few ads, while still managing to look like one big quasi-SEO page.

You can imagine the temptation here: I calculate what they're turning on that site and think I could nearly double it with twice the ads and more quality content/design. But I don't want to create a site advertisers and visitors will run from; advertisers because they don't want their ad to be 1 of 20 and visitors because every promising .gif is an ad.

Does anyone have any general advice here?
(i.e., keep it to fewer than 'X' per page, shouldn't take up more than '%' of screen, etc.)

Any similar experiences you want to share?

Any other advice? Anything is welcome.

[Webwork]

Smarter people than me suggest that anyone with a good idea needs to test, test, test and keep testing.

This requires that one do something and then do something and do something.

So . . . do something.

Hope that helps.

[purplecape]

Testing is a good idea, though it not might capture the long-term effects of too many ads reducing the number of incoming links you get or number of return visits...

IMO you should go with your best judgment, what you like to find in a site as a user of it. Implement that. When the site is established, but not before, then you can test.

[ChitikaDan]

Def. test - there's also a lot to be said for ad location. Certain locations on your pages are next to worthless, so why clutter up the aesthetics by putting ads there? Concentrate on the highest-performing locations, don't bother with the crazy low CTR locations, and you should see decent results.