How to Choose Advertising for Your Site, Part 4: Quantity vs. Quality

By Charlie on July 17th, 2008 | 1

How to Choose Advertising for Your Site

We’ve all seen those sites with a gazillion advertisements. The big fat ad in the header, eight more in the sidebar, Google Adsense sprinkled throughout the posts. Ever wonder if that site’s pulling in good cash? Possibly. But they could be making even more by reducing the amount of ads on their site.

That’s what we’re going to explore in this fourth post of our seven-part series on How to Select Advertising for Your Site.

Guidelines for selecting advertising for your site

4. How much advertising should I have?

That’s a good question. Thank me for asking. The answer depends on a number of things:

Your site’s design
The size of your niche
Ad revenue
Other things not written in this list

One thing that’s certainly true about advertising is that more is not necessarily better.

First off, your site may not spatially accommodate many ads. If your site is 500 pixels wide, a 125×125 pixel ad is proportionately pretty large. And a 250×250 pixel ad would be absolutely ridiculous.

But it’s not just about formal dimensions either. A well-designed site with a lot of whitespace and luscious typography probably shouldn’t have eight ads in the sidebar. They’ll reduce the subtle niceties and before you know, the once beautiful site is now just average or worse.

Perhaps the formulae would be:

Busy site with lots going on = Lots of ads would fit right in nicely.

Minimalistic site with lots of whitespace = Go for fewer ads.

Further, having more ads than less may not even be financially logical. Advertisers see other advertisers as competition. Even if they’re not advertising similar products or services, other ads are viewed as potential lost clicks simply by being in the vicinity of their ads.

Because of this advertisers often reduce their rates, sometimes drastically, when their ad is placed amongst many others. Advertisers are also usually willing to pay a little more for prime real estate. So experiment. It may very well be that one 250×125 ad nets you more revenue than four 125×125 ads combined. You’d thereby make more cash and preserve the integrity of your site.

There are really three ways to determine the amount of advertising you should have on your site.

Testing
Testing
Testing

Try one ad first and get as much for it as you can. Then run four and see what happens. Can you command more money for the four or was the one better by itself? Continue this process as necessary until you’re making as much as you can through your sponsored ads without forsaking the quality of your site.

It’s hard to believe, but we’re actually more than half way through this series now! We’ve got another exciting post coming up, and just to give you a teaser, it’s called “Part 5″. Sounds exciting doesn’t it? You won’t want to miss this one, so subscribe now.