Written by:
2009/11/19 11:27 AM 

Advertising is a big industry. If it did not work many would not use that medium and many of the big marketing and advertising houses would either fail or not be around. So advertising must be working. People must be making money out of it.

But as I browse the web and watch the TV and go to the movies, read newspapers and magazines I see that there is a definite skill and process to successful advertising.

How many ads should I have?

Like many things in life too much of a good thing is a bad thing. There definitely is a limit to the amount of advertising you should have on your blog before it negatively affects your blog.

One thing that I and many other readers hate is arriving at a blog just  to be bombarded with ads. In fact studies have shown that sites with a high percentage of ads actually lose traffic and subsequently lose money. All of these are ways to bring in some cash for your hard work, but at what point does it become counterproductive?

The industry standard of click throughs, that is how many people actually click on an ad, is 0.025% and a range of between 0.17% - 0.68%. Not a lot, which is probably why so many have so many ads on their blog. Test this out, when last did you click on an ad? When last did you stay or come back to a site that was littered with ads.

You can believe this that the next ad you put on your site might well cost you money instead of actually making you money.

What percentage of ads should I have?

In television for example, the average 1 hour show has about 44 minutes of programming and 16 minutes of commercials. That is an ad/content ratio of just over 26%.

Print media such as magazines are far worse. The average magazine has an ad to content ratio of about 40%! That is very high. It's no wonder that the print media has suffered over 10% reduction in sales, and in some areas much more than that.

Can you imagine going to see a movie, where 40% of the viewing time is dedicated to advertising.

I would suggest a number of 15%-20% of your blog to be dedicated to ad space, perhaps less. This might sound like a bit of a step backwards, but believe me it ain't.

Lets look at some numbers.

To understan this logically, lets look at some numbers to see what I am talking about.

Say you have a blog that enjoys 500 page views a month. If you place 5 ads on you site then you could have  2500 ad impressions. Over a year that could workout to 30,000 ad impressions.

500x5x12=30,000

Sounds a lot, but in marketing terms it is not worth it. So why not just add more ads?

Lets look at another proposal. Reduce your ads to three. That is about a 20% reduction. But here is the challenge, work on increasing your blog readership by 10% per month. By doing this you fain the benefit of compounded interest. It does get harder, but the benefits are much larger.

So over a 12 month period if I increase my blog readership by 10% per month I could end up with 35,284 ad impressions. That with a reduction of 20 ads. Over a 24 month period you could end up with 146,020 ad impressions.

Conclusion

This would then prove that the logical course of action. That is to increase readership and traffic as apposed to just adding ads to your blog, which in fact could end up reducing readers and traffic.

How many ads do you have on your blog? Is is affecting your readers?

Related Reading:

Win free advertising for your blog

So you want to monetise your blog do you

Are Internet Ads Effective?

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Technorati tags: Blogging, ads, Advertising, marketing, monetizing

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