Reducing ad impressions

Legitimate ways to combat ad blindness?

[Andrew Bassett]

My CTR is extremely low, mainly because of the repeat-visitor, quick-info nature of my website. So I've done the following:

1) Switched from a tiny square ad in the top right corner to a large rectangle ad in the top center of the main content.

2) As not to torture my users with a huge obnoxious ad unit, I'm displaying my ads 20% of the time instead of 100% of the time.

3) I'm only displaying ads for registered, logged-in users. I feel it's easier to attract new members when they don't see any ads.

I've just emailed AdSense to see if it's ok, but I also want to check with WebmasterWorld members. #3 seems to be iffy because Google will not find any ads on my site.

Sidenote: I feel that CPM ads would be much more appropriate for my site, but it seems like you need millions of visits to get any CPM advertisers.

[hunderdown]

Andrew, I'm not sure that #3 will work for you. If ad blindness is a problem, it's probably more of a problem with your regulars. They will not only have seen the ads on your site before. They will have seen them repeatedly. Making the ads more prominent won't help.

I have actually taken AdSense completely off two of my highest-traffic pages, because so much of the traffic was from regulars that a click was a rarity.

[Andrew Bassett]

Without getting into specifics, the website is FOR my regulars. Basically my members compete against each other in a game, and they visit several times a day to see their latest ranking. This is where my thousands of page impressions come from.

When people find my site, they either a) sign up and visit regularly, or b) leave my site and don't come back. There's nothing useful on my site for a non-member, and therefore it's not logical to show ads to a non-member.

[david_uk]

Not sure that you can put ads on members only (password protected) pages. I'd double check this with Google.

[Andrew Bassett]

The pages are NOT password protected. Anyone can view them. What I'm saying is that only regular members TEND to look at them. However, I can easily distinguish between a person who's logged in and one who's not ( if (player_id > 0) ) and that's where these AdSense questions arise.

[hunderdown]

To me, that sounds like a site that just isn't going to do well with AdSense.

Since your members are into games, have you tried joining affiliate programs, such as Amazon's? You could have a weekly recommended game, with an archive.... And those pages might even do better with AdSense too.

[Andrew Bassett]

Hunderdown, my visitors are not "into games" per se, they're sports fans. So they may be interested in tickets, merchandise, apparel, fantasy leagues, etc.

How "well" my site will do with AdSense is not my immediate concern; I want to experiment and do so within the rules.

I'm always open to other advertiser options, preferably something not CPC based. I should be able to capitalize on my higher impressions.

[Khensu]

YPN has a Sporting Goods Category with sub categories of apparel and equipment.

Also they have a good amount of advertisers in this area, if your pages have a lot of text you can have some self target pretty well and get a different mixture.

Alternate these with your Google ads and you can get a larger inventory of ads. I find if the ads keep changing the people keep reading them, when they start to repeat you get ad blindness.

[Andrew Bassett]

Is YPN available in Canada?

[hunderdown]

Andrew, just trying to think of other possibilities for you. I wouldn't limit my experimenting to AdSense, that's all.

I suggested games because that's what you said people came to your site for! Now that you say they are sports fans, I agree that there are other things that might interest them.

Have you considered creating an "annex," as it were, with information about the sport? If it's unique content, it might get more visitors to the site, and might be a place where AdSense would work better than on the game pages.

Let us know what you do, and how it goes, and good luck!

[Khensu]

YPN not available in Canada yet but I am selling Maple Leafs tickets on my sports page from my AZ based site.

That is what made me think of it, I have been to you site.

That is pretty strange, talk about duality.