Do You Want Advertising Revenue or A Sticky Blog?
If you want to increase your site’s sticky factor — “sticky” meaning your visitors stick around longer and explore your site more before leaving — you may want to rethink the decision to plaster advertising-based exit links all over your blog.
Google Adsense and Site Stickiness are basically incompatible. For visitors to your blog, a clickthru on an ad block link is always trading in/choosing off-site navigation over another internal link. The stickier your blog, the longer they’ll stay focused on YOUR content; an ad click is by nature the termination of the stickiness.
There are ways to at least strike a balance between advertising and site stickiness — keeping me around for one or two extra page views before losing me to an ad click — but you’ll have to limit the pages the ads appear on.
Better Places for Adspace
For instance, you could remove ads on Individual Posts, since the post permalinks represent all the “doors” from which search traffic enters your blog. Search traffic does not feed your front page. The majority of your visitors are entering on the individual post, and then clicking around to other individual headlines, tags, categories, and archives.
By limiting ad blocks to your (WordPress) home.php or index.php — your FRONT page — you put options to leave your site a step deeper in exploration. Your front page is likely to be your second or third page view…
If you’re getting incoming traffic from search that’s finding you for the wrong reasons — keywords that are slightly off target — then you may want to give your visitors options to move on from the first page they see — the permalink or individual post. But that means you’re ASSUMING they landed wrong and want to leave quickly. That’s a high traffic market angle — not a sticky site.
Keep in mind that Steve Pavlina was sticky before he was high-traffic, and introduced ads only after the traffic was high — truly warranted.
Category and Archive pages are good for limited adspace as these are usually a 3rd level pageview. If I come in on an individual post from search, click through to a related entry, go to the home page and check it out, then get down to exploring archives of specific topics — and THEN you reveal your options for leaving on those pages — I’ve stuck around for an average of one to two extra page views.
Make sure your reader has lots of juicy options at the end of each post — category links, tags, and related-entry links — somewhere specific to go next — on YOUR blog — after reading one article and enjoying it enough to stick around for more.
How to Combat Advertising Blindness
Also, to make your Adsense more likely to pull — and you’ll like this because it increases design integrity at the same time — you will get more click thrus on adblocks if they BLEND in with your content.
When your advertising links look like physically different sections of the page — in stark visual contrast — they are less likely to be explored. This is called Ad Blindness — I see the BLOCK in the middle of the road, and go AROUND it like a bright orange traffic cone.
The more savvy your surfers, the more advanced their Ad Blindness — their minds just ignore the ads without even seeing them. By making the ad text, size, backgrounds, and link colors the same as your primary content, your ads get as much potential eyescan as your actual content.
Ah, but there lies the Choice — do you want to give the upper hand — the priority of attention — to your ads or to your original content?
Slade Roberson is an intuitive counselor, ATP®, professional blogger, and the author of Shift Your Spirits, Automatic Intuitive Response, and the PageCoach Problogging Tutorial Series. Slade on Blogging shares behind-the-screens internet marketing, self-publishing, and blogging strategies with other personal development writers, coaches, and healing arts practitioners.
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2 Responses to “Do You Want Advertising Revenue or A Sticky Blog?”
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I’ve been pondering this one, and have decided as soon as I hit the magic $100 mark so I can get paid out by google ads, I’m removing them until further notice. My site launched at the end of Feb - 4 months ago. And I’ve made $88. At $5/wk, it’s not worth the loss of site stickiness, nor the way it looks, now insulting my readers with the nature of some of the ads.
Perhaps if my site’s traffic increased into Steve’s league, it would make sense to bring google back…
But until then, I think I’ll get far more value out of increasing the reader experience and site stickiness.
Another great article.
Thanks for your comment, K-L. In looking at your site and seeing the ads you run, I had been thinking about adding some to my site in the future. Now, because of Slade’s article and your comment, I won’t. Slade, I am learning so much from your articles. Thanks, Patricia