More than 3 banners

[csdude55]

I recently learned that, as of September, Adsense removed the "3 banners per page" limit:

[support.google.com...]

My message board has a lot of pages that are very, very long (eg, 2,000 - 50,000px height), so I could fit a lot of banners on the side without distracting from the content. I currently have one 300x250 above the fold, followed by a 300x400 block of local content, followed by a second 300x250 below the fold, and a leaderboard at the bottom of the page, so those long pages have a lot of empty white space.

My question is, if I fill in that empty space with more and more banners (generated dynamically, of course), do you think that the increased banners will all help to increase the revenue substantially? Or will it lower the value of my existing banners, making the whole thing more or less irrelevant?

[ken_b]

You don't say what's generating all that white space?

Also if those pages are mobile, you have a problem with a 300x250 ATF, that's not allowed.

And then you need to be careful not to show two ads on at the same time on a mobile screen, that's not allowed either.

[csdude55]

I have three different layouts; one for screen width >= 1024, one for >= 800 and < 1024, and one for < 800 (mobile). This would only pertain to the one that's >= 1024.

On that layout, my content is 590px wide, and there's a right column that's 300px wide that contains banners and some inessential local content (featured classifieds, news headlines, etc). Similar to the layout you see on this site, with the right column showing "My Threads", etc... useful, but not essential.

The white space is generated from long threads that have a lot of posts, and that length makes the height longer than the two 300x250 banners and 300x400 block of local content (roughly 1000px in height if you include margins and padding). Much like how this page has a lot of dead space below the "Hire Expert Members" section:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[NickMNS]

As long as, you have content that users are reading near the ads, then you should be able to increase revenue. Active views could give you a way to measure whether the added ad units are being seen. Take note of what the "Active View Viewable" percentage and "Average Time Viewable" are before and after the change. The percentage may drop as you will have more inventory far below the fold, whereas if the ad-units are located in place where users are spending time then the average time should go up.

The one down side risk is if you ad a lot of inventory it may reduce your cpc, cpm as there will not be sufficient supply to maintain the current prices.

[Rasputin]

I appreciate what you are saying about not interrupting the flow of the content, but you will find that ads in the flow of the content do much better than ads to the side, and can also be show more easily on mobiles and tablets.

On very long pages I find that adding ads does increase income noticeably, even if ctr is much lower on ads further down the page.

I even have a link unit right at the bottom of many very long pages where you would think no one would ever see it that still earns around 10 euros a day - not enormous but adds up to a decent amount over the course of a year and in no way detracts from the page appearance for visitors.

[csdude55]

Sorry to revive this older topic, but this is a continuation of the same question.

Is there an advantage to using a different tag for each new banner that's the same size (300x250), or is it just fine to use the same tag over and over?

My message board pages can easily exceed 10000px in height, and I've seen them over 50000px. With my current layout I would have a banner about every 1000px, so unique tags for each banner would mean that I'll need to create 50 tags.

[ember]

In my experience, more ads do not increase revenue. Impressions increase but the ctr drops so there is no gain.