Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Low CTR in January [webmasterworld.com] (post #:3843523)
In the past we tended to focus on trying to integrate the ads with the content. We thought to make the big bucks we had to chase our visitors away by giving them ads to click.We have since changed our tune. Now we focus on increasing pageviews per visit. Making our site more useful and helping folks find what they are looking for in the cases where they may land on the wrong page.
This is true for a useful site. But for those running mfa kingdoms, it might still be useful to just create the "moderately" good content and force the visitor to click...
This is true for a useful site. But for those running mfa kingdoms, it might still be useful to just create the "moderately" good content and force the visitor to click...
Trouble is, if the clicks don't convert, several things can happen:
1) Smart pricing can kick in, devaluing EPC.
2) Advertisers can use their blocking filters to exclude the poorly-converting sites.
3) Advertisers who use placement targeting will tend to avoid the poorly-converting sites.
Having a business model that relies on the imagined stupidity of Google and its advertisers isn't a great recipe for success.
> Having a business model that relies on the imagined stupidity of Google and its advertisers isn't a great recipe for success.
Agree. But if it's not imagined, then...
> Good feeling at the end of the day?
Depends on the amount of the check. No spam or stolen content. Another approach to "hard work".
(Once you needed to write in html code. Today you go the spammy way by using css, wordpress, etc. What's the good feeling at the end of the day? ...)
MFA kingdom owners who already use long-tail targeting do have a future. "targeted niche mini sites", have less competition and a broader spectrum where to find a buck.
A future? We'll see. The Web advertising business seems to be headed in another direction. Also, MFA sites are one-trick ponies: They limit their revenue streams and opportunities because they aren't good enough to attract other, better-paying types of ads.
Maybe I've been around too long, but MFAs give me a sense of "been there, seen that." They're too much like the pure-play affiliate sites that had a brief heyday until the search traffic that they relied on started to dry up. Or like the scraper sites that had everyone upset (or dreaming of becoming scrapers themselves) a couple of years ago. Get-rich-schemes come and go, and they're usually followed by a tsunami of threads on these and other forums about Google search bans and filters, dropping AdSense EPCs or banned accounts, how Google is killing off Web businesses that aren't doing anything illegal, why pure-play affiliates are great for users, why scraper sites are great for advertisers, how click arbitrageurs are contributing to the Internet economy, yadda yadda yadda. In the worlds of Yogi Berra, it's deja vu all over again.
@all
While rethinking what maximillianos wrote (quoted in first post) it appears that the concept is still to (a) get visitors (b) make them click ads.
We have since changed our tune. Now we focus on increasing pageviews per visit. Making our site more useful and helping folks find what they are looking for in the cases where they may land on the wrong page.Ok, so we help folks via the SE to (wrongfully) come to the site, landing on the wrong page, and then we're helpful to show them the way out...
