Try to Make Only One Change at a Time
There is no argument that we periodically need to make adjustments and “tweaks” to the advertising we put up on our sites. Neverending quest, really, to maximize advertising revenue.
Lots of factors to fiddle around with: banners vs. text; ad placement; blinking vs. static; size; shape; font; color of the background, text, link, headlines, url, border; not to mention your site design and layout itself, in combination with each of the other factors, etc. etc. etc.
The point is that these factors may or may not affect your clickthroughs, and hence your revenue. And to complicate things even further, sometimes the most insignificant detail matters.
The only way to know is to test. You can read all the advice and studies and tips out there to help you along, but at the end of the day as far as your site goes, you’ll just have to test to see what works best.
So, we test. We make a change to something, and see how that affects clicks.
But to test effectively, you’ll have to remember to try to make and test for only one change at a time. Yeah, it’s a much slower process than doing what I call “overhauls,” But it’s far more revealing, not to mention less potentially damaging if you already have a site that’s already “doing OK” advertising clicks-wise.
To what degree of detail you’ll take this, that’s up to you… and your site’s traffic. There are many things you can’t effectively measure, for example, with a low traffic site (in which case, best focus on building up traffic first before fiddling around much with advertising formats). And I’ve seen tiny changes do notbing on medium traffic sites but have some significant influences on heavier ones. Just the nature of the beast.
Venturing a guess, if you’re just starting out with this testing thing, I’d say first isolate your ads to where they appear on your page (header, body, margin, footer, etc.). See if you can figure out how to automatically collect and measure separate metrics (the traffic numbers) for each. Then give it enough time to gather a base set of numbers to work with. When you’re ready to start testing, do a change to only one ad area at a time (e.g., change body ad, measure) and go from there.
Have fun!
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