How to Increase Ad Revenue With the Same Website Traffic

Increase the Share of Viewable Impressions

Your website can generate lots of ad impressions, but if users don’t scroll all the way to the advertisement or don’t have time to see it, part of those impressions are practically useless. That means you need to focus on those ads that actually generate impressions and increase them. You have to:

1. Check the visibility of every ad space.
2. Find spots that have a high number of impressions, but low visibility and revenue.
3. Test moving them to locations where users tend to linger, like inside the content or next to popular page elements. 
4. Try lazy loading for below–the–fold ads.

Increase Competition for Ad Inventory

The more eligible demand sources compete for your inventory, the better your chances of receiving a competitive bid. To increase competition, you can:

1. Instead of joining just one, partner with several platforms where you can sell ad spots from your website (ad networks like HilltopAds are your best friends for this task). Remember, you don’t have to monetize all your websites with a single network; you can diversify and A/B test.
2. Use Header Bidding, which allows multiple demand partners to compete for the same ad impression before the ad server makes its final decision. More competition can increase the chances of receiving a higher bid for your inventory.
3. Monetize unused ad inventory. For example, if you run only Banners on your website, you might want to reduce their number and add some Pre-Rolls. This way, you have more points of contact with your audience and your ads won’t come up as annoying and repetitive; at least the likelihood of that will be lower.

Experiment With Ad Formats

We recommend testing Banners, In–Page Push, Popunder, Video, Direct Link, and MultiTag formats separately to see which works better in certain ad spots. We also advise you to evaluate the results based on the website’s overall income instead of focusing on CPM alone. After all, that’s just one metric, and you want to see the bigger picture for better monetization.

Don’t overdo it, though; your task is to increase revenue with an existing user base, not scare off your audience with tons of ads. Fortunately, we have vast experience helping publishers to run all kinds of websites, so we know precisely when enough is enough.

Increase Session Depth

Successful website monetization with an existing audience also heavily depends on session depth. For example, if a lone user during their session visits, let’s say, three pages instead of one, the website will show them more ads, which means you can earn as much as if you’d attracted several visitors to a single page!

But what should you do exactly to reach more depth? Start off with hyperlinks to existing materials on your website. In fact, it’s best to make new content with a clear understanding that you’re going to hyperlink it and, possibly, use several social platforms. Break the topic into subtopics so you can continue publishing without abrupt jumps. “By failing to prepare, you’re preparing to fail”, as they say.

Add blocks to your website that invite your visitors to learn more about the topics they like. Things like “Related Articles” or “Read Next” work wonders when used properly. Introduce thematic collections and recommendations to retain your users, but always remember that transitions should be natural. Don’t force them by splitting your content artificially or forcing unnecessary clicks; that’s detrimental to user engagement.

Remove Ineffective Ads

Let’s get this out of the way: More ads doesn’t mean more earnings. Your earnings do depend on the number of ads, but that’s not the only and not the most important factor (see the section earlier). If you overburden your page with ads, especially heavy ones, your loading speed might take a hit, disrupt the flow of content, irritate subscribed users (especially on mobile), and become a nuisance rather than an opportunity.

Don’t get us wrong, you can fill your website with ads to the brim and beyond. It’s just that they might work once, but users will notice and won’t come back, thinking the website is an ad junkyard. Even if there’s genuine value, it will simply be buried under the avalanche of ads that look like spam and malware. That’s one of the main reasons why we advocate that “how” is more important than “how much.”

Identify the Most Profitable Content

Website monetization doesn’t rely on ads alone, but also on the content you make. You need to know what generates more revenue and create more of the same. To identify what’s profitable, you have to:

1. Compare pages with similar visit counts but different revenue.
2. Identify the most profitable themes and content types.
3. Keep the audience’s GEO, devices, and interests in mind.
4. Develop areas that consistently generate more income.

We know many publishers have daytime jobs and run their blogs as a hobby, treating website monetization as extra income, so constant money and revenue thinking can easily kill the fun. Even if your website is your main job, you don’t need to always approach content creation from the business perspective. If you have a risky idea you’re passionate about and really want to try, go for it; who knows, it may be rewarding. Just be sure to place experimental content in between regular, more “monetizable” material, so you’ll have a financial cushion.

Test One Change at a Time

To understand what actually affects your revenue, make one change at a time and compare revenue per visitor or session before and after the test.

The entire cycle must go as follows: Find the weak spot → change exactly one parameter → evaluate the result and impact on user experience → based on the outcome, keep or remove the change.

Nik

Publisher Manager at HilltopAds

Simply increasing the number of ads or their frequency isn’t always effective and can, in some cases, lead to lower conversion rates. More ads alone don’t guarantee increased revenue. It’s much more important to tailor a monetization approach to your specific audience.