I’ve read many blog posts advising as to when aspiring bloggers should add banners to their sites. In my opinion the advice given in most posts that you should only add adverts once you’ve got an established readership is wrong. A good blog should always be attracting new readers, so why should new readers be treated any differently to readers who were lucky enough to see the blog in its infancy without ads?
My advice is, if you are going to monetise your blog, then you should do so from day one. This will also allow you to experiment with placements and different networks when the numbers are not critical e.g. a 10% reduction in earnings from a bad decision will only be worth cents in the early days, whereas a bad decision when your site is successful could cost you hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars.
When I’m experimenting with new ad types, I tend to look at a combination of two factors in deciding whether or not to maintain the ads on my sites. If a new network meets both criteria, then I run their ads.
CPM
The only CPC ads I run on my sites are Google Adsense ads. This is because these were the first ads I added back in 2006 when I decided to try and make an income from this site (my first site), so I have a lot of knowledge about how they can perform. In fact, Adsense is still one of my best performing networks from a eCPM perspective.
For my other networks, I only run the ads if the CPM meets my min requirement. This used to be $1 CPM but I’ve recently raised it. I set a CPM floor, because in my opinion I’d rather not show ads that have low CPMs because the payments at the end of the month aren’t spectacular and also because they tend to be cheap and tacky ads, or aren’t paying enough to warrant forcing readers to look at them.
Ads I’ve removed because the CPM are too low include Google Adsense for Feeds ads. The CPMs I saw there were obscenely low, less than $0.10. Many users use RSS to get an ad-free reading experience, so subjecting these users to ads when I was making less than $20 per month just didn’t make sense.
Fill Rate
Running a high CPM ad is no good though, if the fill rate is too low because all it means is either lots of empty ad spaces, or if you are using an alternate network, unnecessary delays to page loads while the ad network registers yet another page impression they can’t monetise.
An example of a network I removed despite a very high CPM was Vibrantmedia. Their InterestAds sounded perfect, paying a guaranteed CPM in excess of $4. However, the fill rate was less than 0.5%. This meant that on almost every pageload there were noticable delays while their script ran with no ads being served, so I removed their script.
Another example is the Videoegg ads you might have seen running in my footer and header earlier this month. The CPMs again were decent at just over $2, but again the fill rate was too low to justify the additional delays to page loads.
Do you assess any other factors when deciding whether or not to display an advert on your site?
