Forum Moderators: martinibuster
We have a pretty good audience. The surveyed readers reveal themselves to be gearhead guys, age 40, with incomes of close to $100,000 per year and spending on photography of at least $2-3000 per year.
Looking at our site, most of our ads are garbage and they are repetitive, especially from Google. These are ads that our readers wouldn't want to see even once and certainly wouldn't be likely to click on after the 100th repetition. eCPM from google is very low.
I know that we are doing something very very wrong, but I can't figure out what it is. What should we be doing? is it possible that we have gotten into a vicious spiral where our clickthrough rate was low so Google is giving us crummy ads and that drives our clickthrough rate down even lower?
[edited by: eljefe3 at 11:41 pm (utc) on Dec. 28, 2006]
[edit reason] edited out URL's [/edit]
[en.wikipedia.org...]
Good luck with this part of the saga. IMO you need to contact Google directly, you have the credentials to make someone sit p and take notice.
.. I can see why you have the problems with the ads you are getting from Google. Not their fault, more yours! Basically you need to have better keyword targeted pages to get the ads that you feel you want/need from Google. My advice would be to hire a specialist to get you those targeted ads.
It is comparatively easy to juggle the ads you get displayed from AdSense by juggling the page (in its entirety) and see what each alteration is likely to deliver in the way of ads.
Maybe looking at alternatives is the answer. Finding advertisers yourself will take up resources on its own, but your return should be higher as you can sell to advertisers willing to pay a premium for your space.
My experience in this area extends as far as currently developing an automated classification system which chooses the 'best' category (from 2000) that any given page fits into - to then show adverts for. I suspect this approach may be tricky for a photography site, but it shouldn't be too difficult in the camera advice section.
If you can allocate a hand-written search phrase which fits a group of pages well, you are halfway to getting better results.
For general pages I would start thinking along the lines of associated products (which I have no idea what the users will like, that's for Philip and his crew to look into). An example of this would be Motorcycles, do the 40-year old males on the site have a liking for bikes? If they do then you have a great angle to sell display advertising when a new model is released.
A good place to find target advertisers is in the printed publications that interest your userbase. Again I'm guessing, but I imagine that watch manufacturers place ads in such mags. If they pay for print ads you also know they have reasonable budgets.
Finally, you should already be aware of who advertises on sites similar to yours. As a popular site you should be able to attract the branding dollar, far better than those more interested in ROI.
Good Luck
Nice site btw.
My review of your site suggests one problem, your adsense ads are being displayed via a JS script therefor not optimized to the content of your pages, adsense states clearly to copy the code directly into you pages.
Regards,
NoodleBox.
[edited by: noodlebox at 12:45 pm (utc) on Dec. 29, 2006]
As inbound suggested, I would be looking at the alternatives ;)
Good luck!
Ad placement is not correct - follow adsense heat map
Site design is for web 1.0
Broken links
Talk to Google and get dedicated rep for optimization
1: put direct adsense, so you may get more ads, content related ads
2: blend ads
3: on each image page, you had put ads top of the page, instead put just below the image, also same blend ads...
iam not great as you,
but i hope, u will do them to get more CTR
Having seen the website, all I can say is: props. Seems like you've done things far beyond most of us here. Welcome to WebmasterWorld!
Some hints from a small-timer:
1. I'm sure better implementation can do wonders. Standard colors are one thing, but variation is something else.
2. Use your bargaining position. Negotiation-wise you have a good position when it comes to getting special treatment from GA. They WILL invest in you, they WILL appoint someone to help you and they WILL work on your account. Something all of us would like but only a few on this board actually experience....
3. Website-wise, some things might be distracting your visitors... From fixed to non-fixed lay-out, from this to another font,... This may not look like totally Adsense-relevant but I believe it is. Create variable positions for adsense, without being too obtrosive.
The website has such potential, but from what I see it's not doing what it could... I'm sure quite a few of the publishers checking out were thinking: I could probably get great results with this userbase and domain ;)
Good luck, and nothing but respect for the pioneers. I was playing with legos when you were doing this.... :)
1) AD PLACEMENT. You've got AdSense ads on gallery pages, but they're missing from some of your equipment pages. If anything, placement should be the other way around.
2) LAYOUT. Some of your pages are so long (and require so much scrolling) that the ads are barely seen before the reader scrolls away.
3) TARGETING. To some extent, this may be a consequence of (2). A single-page, 2,000-word article on how to buy a vacation camera is harder for an ad bot to target than a review of the Widgetco WC-1 DSLR.
4) CONTENT MIX. Your site is heavy on photo galleries and forums, neither of which tend to do well with AdSense (compared to equipment reviews and the like). It's worth noting that, when Google introduced "smart pricing" discounts for AdSense advertisers in 2004, it used two photo-related examples in its announcement: a page of photo tips (which wouldn't be expected to convert well), and a camera review (which would).
5) AUDIENCE MOTIVATION. Your audience has great demographics, but are your readers/viewers/members looking for when they visit the site? What's their mindset? More than likely, they're coming to look at great photos and to interact with other photographers than to research gear purchases. For the latter, they're probably going to review sites (and, in some cases, to major e-commerce sites where they can compare prices, research accessories, etc.).
THE SOLUTION:
To some extent, you may be able to fix your AdSense problems through more effective ad placement, but with your traffic and demographics, you'd probably be better off finding a rep firm (or even an individual ad rep) that knows your industry and can sell display leaderboards or skyscrapers. The prosperous 40-year-old guys who are spending a couple of grand a year on photo gear may not be great AdSense prospects when they're looking at your excellent photo galleries, but they're likely to be great targets of branding, awareness-building, and product-announcement campaigns. (I suspect that your readers have more in common with the POP PHOTO or AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHER audience than with people who are scanning Craiglist or shopping eBay.)
By the way, I've admired your site for years, and I disagree with those who suggest that you should blend ads or do anything else that would compromise its credibility with photo buffs. You'd be nuts to sacrifice the "brand equity" that you've built up by resorting to cheap tricks--but I'm sure that you already know that!
I disagree with those who suggest that you should blend ads or do anything else that would compromise its credibility with photo buffs. You'd be nuts to sacrifice the "brand equity" that you've built up by resorting to cheap tricks...
Agreed. Visitors who click on ads without knowing that they're actually ads are very unlikely to convert. Pile up enough of those and your odds of being smart priced increase proportionately.
you are headed in the right direction there, but epc should be the goal, not ctr.
your site can be divided into several parts, by the ads that you have on the pages:
1)review pages: affiliates
2)photo pages: adsense
2)forum pages: adsense
so you are giving adsense the worst traffic that you have, which has driven your epc into the ground... there are a bunch of site-targeted ads for google base, for example, which prove that... site-targeted ads are showing up because they earn more than contextual adsense on those pages, which is a terrible situation to be in.
i would regard google base as a competitor, and put it in the filter.
don't fall into the trap of putting adsense on every page you have... google is currently telling you that they don't want the traffic you are sending them.
if it was my site, i'd remove adsense entirely from the photo and forum pages, and put it on your review pages... sooner or later you will see a big spike in epc.
i don't like banners, so i'd probably use ypn or text affiliate ads for the photo and forum pages for now... use channels to monitor the epc, you'll be able to see what kind of traffic google likes.
thanks for sharing your site with the forum!
You'd be nuts to sacrifice the "brand equity"
Agree absolutely, but better positioning of ads in some parts of the site could acheive significant results without any such sacrifice, in fact they would add to it's quality and usefulness.
As EFV pointed out, the pages most likely to convert on this site - the reviews - have essentially no advertising at all, since once you start scrolling (and there is sometimes a LOT of scrolling) you never see them and they have almost certainly disappeared by the time you get to the end of the article.
Maybe an ad block at the end of the article? Would not compromise quality but might provide more relevant ads.
I don't know if you have tried them, but adunits below the left navigation (where it appears) could work very well here too.
The links about buying stuff are at times quite confusing. On one page I clicked a "where to buy" link at the end of a review and got a brief statement about why Amazon was a recommended place to buy, but no recognisable link to Amazon - instead an ad with another store name. Confusing. I might just mosey on over to Amazon then without any affiliate code..... waste!
I also find the site quite difficult to navigate - though I imagine that is not the case for regular users who have it figured out - as it keeps changing appearance and a lot of the time I have no sense of where I am within the site structure.
That may not seem relevent to the ads thing, but sort of is. After I had looked at several reviews I found it quite tricky to get back to the first one, if I was in buying mode I would have had my comparison shopping done and been ready to commit - but completely lost. Google here I come - income there you go!
if it was my site, i'd remove adsense entirely from the photo and forum pages, and put it on your review pages... sooner or later you will see a big spike in epc.
EPC is less important than eCPM or total earnings, but I agree that AdSense ads probably aren't the way to go on photo and forum pages (though they may be worth keeping if they're generating enough income even at a low average EPC).
i don't like banners, so i'd probably use ypn or text affiliate ads for the photo and forum pages for now...
There's one problem with that strategy: If AdSense ads don't perform on those pages, YPN or affiliate ads won't, either. Display banners or skyscrapers can be extremely profitable--and valuable to advertisers--if you've got the right audience demographics (as the site in question obviously does) and enough traffic to interest advertisers and their ad agencies (ditto).
There are CPM organizations out there that could help monotize your page views.
i don't agree that he should automatically reject everything except banner ads... banners really cheapen the look of a site, big time, so it's a last resort, not a first choice.
he needs to experiment with that particular site first, what you or i have done is not guaranteed to work for his worst traffic.
it's apples and oranges, because affiliate ad companies will do a much better job of controlling the relevant ad content on his site than adsense is doing... and ypn is so short for quality advertisers right now that they will serve up whatever they have in his sector, lol.
i would rotate those forum/photo page ad blocks with an ad server, to help prevent ad blindness... and yeah, maybe intersperse banners in the mix, to see what works.
Now, with that aside, I have to agree that many pages are too long. I'm one of those visitors that would rather go to next page(s) than scroll more than a screen or two. A side advantage of breaking an article into multiple pages is that each page can be more targeted, which might bring in a wider variety of ads.
Also, I totally missed seeing the leaderboards at the top on my first views of a few pages. My eyes simply didn't go there. Once I took a closer look I found them. Lower and closer to the articles would've had a better chance of catching my attention.
I also noticed that there are quite a number of site targeted ads - which may or may not be good for earnings. Only you'd know the answer to that.
i don't agree that he should automatically reject everything except banner ads... banners really cheapen the look of a site, big time, so it's a last resort, not a first choice.
Irrelevant banners for Internet casinos, dating services, and debt consolidation may cheapen the look of a site.
Banners for relevant big-name advertisers add to the credibility of a site, and they look far less "cheap" than poorly-targeted text ads do. They also pay quite well, and they're likely to perform better (in terms of the advertisers' objectives and expectations, such as branding or awareness-building) than CPC or affiliate ads on photo-gallery and forum pages. For example, if Widgetco introduces a new DSLR, it wants to get the word out to camera enthusiasts--whether or not those enthusiasts are looking to make e-commerce transactions when they're viewing a given page.
The trick is in obtaining those relevant big-name display advertisers. That's hard for the average small site to do, and it's also a challenge for general-interest portals, forums, etc. that get a lot of traffic but don't deliver targeted audiences. But a site with 60 million pages a month that reaches a well-heeled enthusiast audience should be able to do quite well with display ads, assuming that it has a competent ad rep or rep firm.
notice how he is not running banners? ask yourself why a smart guy like that is not doing something that seems so obvious.
I'm not thrilled with the isolated square I saw later on down the page either. It also seemed like wasted space to me.
Ad content aside, I think the all the ads I saw in my quick 30 second run through could be positioned much better and actually increase the perceived quality of the site.
If it were my site, I'd start by restructuring where and how the ads are placed on the page. Make it closer to the content and make the whole page "flow" as one.
Your gallery pages may perform like what people here expect for ad performance on forum pages. I'd mostly write the gallery pages off as a loss leader, clean thing up ad wise, and treat them like feeder pages to your better quality (for advertising) pages like reviews. Use AdSense channels to identify what types of pages bring home the bacon. Modify your non-performing pages to easily allow visitors to flow to your higher EPM pages. For instance, on the gallery page, why isn't the camera the photo was taken with linked to a page specific to a page for that brand, model or even camera review? That's where you'll make your money.
I don't know, but getting AdSense off your gallery pages and any other poor performers may help your targeting on the rest of the site.
The other comments about the reviews page are spot on as well. Here's what I would do TODAY if this were my site.
Add a small adsense square at the begining of each review floated to the right of the beginning of the content, as well as a 468 banner directly at the end of the content before the comments start. Make the border match the background (white.) It won't look obtrusive. You will hopefully get very targeted ads to camera equipment. EPM will be night and day compared to what you're probably getting now.
Talk to Google about getting an AdSense rep. If you qualify as a premium partner, you may have manual ad targeting methods available to you as well.
I could go on or more in depth, but that's enough to at least get your mind thinking in the right direction.
i suspect that mr. greenspun has already made that decision, which is why you don't see any banners on his site :-)
1) Build up the reviews section (with more reviews and, above all, more up-to-date reviews) or...
2) Put greater emphasis on articles such as Mr. Greenspun's "Building a Digital SLR System."
Option 1 may be difficult, and there's plenty of competition from outstanding (and popular) camera-review sites.
Option 2 has the advantage of leveraging Mr. Greenspun's writing talents, expertise, and existing content base (e.g., through occasionally updated "evergreen" articles such as the aforementioned "Building a Digital SLR System").
Another advantage of Option 2 is that it can bring in traffic (through search) from potential camera buyers who don't already have a closetful of photo gear. These readers are likely to be good prospects for advertisers and affiliate merchants.
Obviously, the photo galleries and critiques are, to a great degree, the heart and soul of Mr. Greenspun's superb site. But building up the "how-to" section with regularly updated evergreen content could make a substantial contribution to advertising and affiliate revenues by helping the site to reach a broader audience of people who are researching ways to spend their money on cameras and related gear.
Obviously, the photo galleries and critiques are, to a great degree, the heart and soul of Mr. Greenspun's superb site.
Agreed. It's possible however (I don't know) that in general the EPM for that type of page is crummy. Properly placed, they may be a loss leader for the revenue producing pages. There's nothing wrong with that.
It's kinda of like a grocery store business (in the US anyway.) Most grocery stores make very little profit off the goods in the main isles of the store...which is what people come for. They make most of their profit on the edge of the store in the deli, bakery, produce, meats, prepared food, flowers, video rental, etc. Without the low margin stuff, they wouldn't sell the high margin stuff.
I think that may be the case with this site. There are at least some review pages with, as far as I can tell, no ads at all. That's like opening a grocery store without any of the high margin "edge departments."
Additionally, if the targeting is really as horrible as it looks to me on the gallery pages, he may be best served by removing AdSense from those pages all together...but only if the high margin pages are ready to pick up the financial load. They go hand in hand.
I am suspicious that AdSense on the gallery pages may screw up targeting for the rest of the site, but am curious what others think.
Agreed. It's possible however (I don't know) that in general the EPM for that type of page is crummy. Properly placed, they may be a loss leader for the revenue producing pages. There's nothing wrong with that.
I agree completely. Those are the pages that attract the serious photographers who are prime candidates for display ads. Of course, it's possible that they could attract decent-paying site-targeted CPM ads from AdSense, too--but display ads are likely to pay better.
BTW, affiliate links were mentioned earlier. On a site that caters to enthusiasts, the publisher needs to be sure that affiliate referrals will generate commissions even when the users are existing customers of the affiliate merchants.
Additionally, if the targeting is really as horrible as it looks to me on the gallery pages, he may be best served by removing AdSense from those pages all together...but only if the high margin pages are ready to pick up the financial load. They go hand in hand.As a longtime user of the site discussed here I can asure you that I never clicked on any adsense ad there. There is just no reason to do so.
[webmasterworld.com...] original post from Markus007
[webmasterworld.com...] The Technical Aspects of running a One Person High Traffic site
Basically, there are three groups of visitors on the site, those there to learn, enjoy community, and buy. Those just stopping by to learn about gear they already have won't click on many ads. Same with the community folks who will have ad blindness.
Start with or focus on camera gear reviews, top, middle, and bottom (end of the review). The readers are primed to buy online and are prepared to spend a lot of cash; so conversion rates should be highest, and the payout should be great.
p/g
