Sprucing Your Blog Up by Changing and Rotating Your Ads

Critiqued by Cowboytf | March 24, 2008 .

This is something that is so simple to do and yet it’s not done near enough, especially with people who aren’t using some sort of ad manager like OIO-Publisher. Most ad clicks come from first-time visitors, as your regular readers tend to become “blind” to your ads - they filter them, unconsciously. Newcomers are curious and usually will check it out. This is why it’s important to change your ads.

Here’s my suggestion: from time to time (I’d say at least monthly), change your ads. You can do one of the following, or a combination of several:

change an ad’s size or format
move an ad to a different position aka rotation
completely remove an ad for a while
add a new ad somewhere (assuming you don’t already have too many, of course - you don’t want more ads than content)
change an ad’s provider: for instance, replace an adsense ad with an affiliate ad, or a blogads one.
change an ad’s colors - if it used the colors of your site, try using different, more visible colors for a while. Conversely, try changing a “blended in” ad to colors that stand out more.
if using non-contextual ads (such as the default Chitika mode), try changing the keywords - possibly even replacing them completely with a bunch of new ones (but save the old ones somewhere, so you can compare results).

This may sound like a lot of work, but can help a lot in terms of click-through rate (CTR) and it’s much easier than trying to figure out your life insurance rates so you have no excuses. One other reason (and a very important one, too) to do this is that you’ll be able to learn a lot about which ad formats, positions, colors, ad providers, keywords, etc. work better or worse. Remember to configure channels, if available, for each type of ad, so you can track which ones give you a better CTR, and more money. Again, I highly recommend an ad manager like OIO-Publisher to make this a much easier process.

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2 Comments so far

Jim March 24, 2008 11:51 am

Seems like a fantastic idea! It is amazing how little changes like this can make such a huge impact in how your readers react to your postings. Very informative article, keep up the great work :D

Jim’s last blog post..Ten Things to Blog About… When You Don’t Know What to Blog About
Cowboytf March 24, 2008 11:59 am

Small things like this can increase conversions big time. People are so busy making big overhauls on their blogs that they tend to overlook the simple small ones. Thanks for stopping by Jim.