My instinct when trying to increase revenue on a site has always been to increase advertising. Basically there’s a few ways I’ve done this:
- Increasing the number of adverts. For instance adding an extra popup, adding a left skyscraper ad in addition to the right sky, etc.
- Moving ads to positions that get more clicks (for CPA/CPC ads), such as moving the navigational menu to the right side and moving the ad to the left (where heat maps generated from eye ball tracking show users instinctively look for menus).
Undoubtedly these things work, but they tend also to decrease the amount of time and number of pages a visitor will go on in your site. They’ll also increase the bounce rate.
By making improvements to your sites usability you can drastically – often by factors over a 100% – increase your number of page views. This is especially great if your site uses CPM ads, but it also helps CPC ads as users will more likely be presented with one they wish to click on.
For instance due to concerns over the security of the old script on URGames.com (which remains my most popular site despite my lack of work on it in literally years while I was at university) I recently decided to move. Initially I’d planned a static and then a wordpress based solution, but after coming across a popular and well executed script I decided to give it a go. The design on the site was intended to get users to click on as many games as possible – thus to spend as long on the site as possible. It does this while still allowing a fair number of ads, actually increasing the amount from what there was previously but in a less noticeable way.
Basically the average time and number of pages visitors are on the site for has more than doubled. And better still the revenue increase has been several times that, I don’t want to give out exact details and due to reporting time differences between ad networks (and currency differences) it would be hard for me to do, but the site has probably just jumped from being about my fourth to my first in terms of revenue.
Similar things have happened before when I’ve increased user experience. I used to own a site called FunnySigns.net (I sold this to a friend earlier this year when I needed money for to pay taxes). The site was pretty consistent in the traffic it was getting as it had been number 2 in google for effectively the only worthwhile term for its genre (Funny Signs) for years. I’d therefore effectively ignored it other than once increasing the amount of ads on the site. A year ago I was going through my sites and looking at which ones were, um, frankly ugly. I therefore decided to give it a redesign which included adding arrows to the side of the funny sign images to visit the next image. Overnight the site jumped from around 12 pageviews per visitor to over 40, here’s image proof:
Not only did pageviews increase but visitors started staying longer and visiting more often – and the bounce rate plummeted:
(The scale of this is the same, 1 August to 30 September 2010, with the changes being implemented on the 3rd September.)
I don’t want to give revenue stats, but from the main ad network more than tripled and the secondary one was by a factor of 2.5 between August and September that year.
I’m in no way suggesting that you go remove ads from your site – this really isn’t the purpose of this post. The purpose is to get you to improve usability of your site to increase page views.
I think a good way of doing this is to think about visitors as goal orientated. Visitors to an online game site want to have fun by playing good quality online games. To reach that goal they need to be presented with options that show what games are on offer at every moment of their journey through the site, including on the pages where they are already playing games (so that when they get bored of the one they are playing they have another one lined up to play). With the funny signs site their goal is to have a little chuckle at eat sign. Why should they have to go back to a category page to get to the next sign – why not just have a big Next button.
Obviously the two examples above are relatively simple and the user goals are easy to satisfy. This isn’t ecommerce where a users goal requires significant convincing of by the website to reach due to it having a cost to the user.
I’ve recently been hired to do some copy (probably for article marketing) for a SEO firm. I’ve had to write several thousand words for them on increasing conversions on websites that are largely ecommerce. The SEO firm does this by designing the site from a wireframe based on eye ball tracking and changes the design when it’s implemented by using multivariate testing (randomly showing visitors different versions of the site). For most of us making content sites this is far more than what we need to do, but their focus on visitor goals is a good one.
For instance on my history websites when users arrive while searching for a person they will want one of several different things. I drew up this list:
- They’ll want quick facts, perhaps wanting one particular one already or just to know the basics. For instance when born, major achievements, career, etc
- They may want to read a biography of the person
- They might be looking for multimedia – videos, audio, photos, etc
- They might want a timeline
- They might want materials by the person themselves – quotes, speeches, books
Having a one-page-fits-all strategy just won’t work, while just having a long biography is great for SEO it isn’t what users want. Since the Panda update it seems Google is actually looking at toolbar data on how long users spend on sites and how many bounce, hence why old sites with great backlinks have suddenly dropped down the SERP rankings.
My solution is to offer many pages for each person, the main one being a biography for SEO link building purposes, but other pages for each of the different user goals – one of quotes, one of speeches, one as a timeline, a page of facts, etc. Then at the top of the biography present users with a very clear menu of the different pages written in a way which will hopefully help them identify what fits their goal.
As I haven’t implemented this across all pages of my history sites yet I don’t have any analytics to show you on this, but my guess is this will really increase time spent on the site as users won’t just be presented with a long piece of text they have to wade through for the answer to the question they had when they searched.