Is it REALLY about traffic…

I don’t think a day goes by that I am not asked by at least one or two members of my sites how they can get more traffic. To their surprise, I almost always ask if they have tested the location of their ad placements before we even look at messing with traffic (particularly when we are speaking in terms of Google Adsense). They look at me like I have two heads, and could not have asked a more irrelevant question if I tried.

The fact is, an awful lot of people jump at the traffic issues, but what we are really talking about is not traffic, it is sales revenue, which is not just a product of traffic, but rather:

TRAFFIC x CONVERSION = REVENUE

So, before we spend $0.01 on traffic generation or ppc, or organic seo or whatever else comes down the proverbial traffic generation pipe in the future, we need at least a basic understanding of conversion, and how dramatically it is affected by things like ad placement, which is what we are going to look at here.

The location of an ad on any given page of copy will determine how successfully that ad converts. This is especially true of Adsense, where site owners should be knocking themselves out to make the ad look like it is part of the page, not just using the default ad color templates, and then you need to optimize the location on the page.

Google has provided us with a “heat map”. A heat map tells us which locations on a page are clicked the most by using colors. Have a look at the image below:

The area that is the “hottest” is directly above the content, followed by to the left of the content, etc. Note that a point that is not clear in this image provided by Google is that the ads should be above the “fold” of the page for maximum conversion. This means the area of the page that shows in the wb browser before the visitor scrolls down.

Simply relocating where your ads are located on the page can easily increase conversion as much as 3X, and that is WITHOUT increasing traffic to the webpage at all, and much, much cheaper.

Have a look at these screenshots of the Adsense on one of my sites, PagerankPrediction.com. The first image uses the default Google Adsense format:

Deafult Google Adsense Format

Default Adsense Format

The seond one is with a more customized Google Adsense format:

Custom Adsense Format

Custom Adsense Format

You can see that the title text of the ads is now the same color as the title for the main page, and the ad descriptions are now the faded grey color, like the text on the main page.

These two changes result in 2X the clicks from the original format.

Why are these ads clicked on twice as much – it is a phenomena in advertising called ad blindness. People eventually stop seeing the ads because they know the format on some mental level all look the same. SOme people called it the windshield wiper theory. When you first turn on your windshield wipers, they are almost annoying, but after a while you no longer see them. The brain just blocks them out.

Same thing happens with the zillions of Adsense ads we see every day. Customizing the ads to your site design takes like 30 seconds. Placing them on the right spots according to the heat map, and staying above the fold as much as possible will further increase your conversion.

From this, you can see just how easy it is double conversion in less than 30 minutes, all without increasing your traffic. After all, it is about the money, and not the traffc.

Cheers,

Ron Davies

[tags]google adsense, ad placement, google heat map, heat map, ad format, adsense format, increased traffic[/tags]