Improving Pay-per-Click Click-Through Rates (continued, part 2)
2. Decrease Competition
One of the cardinal sins of many web sites is to overload their web pages with numerous banners or other graphics. For many, the reasoning is that the more choices they give, the better the chance the person will find something of interest, and decide to click-through. However, this rarely holds true.
Generally the more ads and graphics you have on a page the more you confuse your visitors. Think of it this way. When a person visits your web site, different parts of the site are in competition for the visitor's eyes. Where are they looking? What are they searching for?
The more banners there are, the more their eyes are distracted, and quite possibly simply overwhelmed. Different colors and flashing animations can simply cause information overload, forcing your visitor to mentally tune out all banners on the site, even ones that may have normally been of interest to them.
By reducing the amount of 'clutter' your visitor will be much more likely to focus in on an ad, and therefore be more more likely to click on it. As a general rule of thumb, a web page, unless very long (and therefore probably slow loading...another sin), should have no more than two banner ads. One at or near the top as described above, and another at or near the bottom.
This also provides the side advantage of making your site more appealing to your visitors, since they don't have to scroll through a half-dozen banners to find the information they came to your site for in the first place.
3. Use a Call to Action
This is one suggestion where you do need to be careful. Different pay-per-click programs and networks have different rules about using a call to action, and I highly recommend you investigate the program to verify it is allowed before implementing this strategy.
That said, where allowed, adding a call to action to your site in general, or near a banner ad, can be effective in improving click-throughs.
An internal test I ran on another web site I partner with showed that banners marked with a simple 'Please visit our site's sponsor' link, showed a statistically relevant 0.3% improvement in click-through over identical ads that weren't marked. This could work out to a substantial improvement in income, since a 0.3% increase results in an extra 3 clicks for every 1000 impressions. Using a standard pay-per-click network, this could work out to as much as a $0.60 improvement for every 1000 banner displays on your site.
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