More ads does not necessarily translate to higher CTR and revenue
By Jason Menayan January 30th, 2008In an earlier post, we debunked a myth that maximizing the number of displayed ads on a page will maximize your revenue. We had seen scenarios among our clients where YieldBuild had actually reduced the number of ads displayed on a page in order to maximize revenue.
So we ran on a test on our publisher site, HubPages.com, which also runs YieldBuild to maximize the revenue for us and the writers. The site has healthy traffic (over 13 million monthly pageviews) and diverse content lengths and layouts. We made the assumption that, since all ads were delivered via AdSense, and that content and traffic is stable across the site, that CTR was proportional to revenue.
The results confirm that more is not necessarily better:
The difference is not large (but it is statistically significant), and this is just one website, but it only takes one exception to disprove the rule. More ads does not necessarily mean more revenue.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 7:11 pm and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
February 4th, 2009 at 6:50 am
[...] less is more. (Although, unless you have YieldBuild, you won’t know until you test)Unless you have a testing protocol in place that demonstrates otherwise, your best rule-of-thumb bet is to go with the three main ad sizes: 300 x 250 (”medium rectangle”); 160 x 600 (”wide skyscraper”); and 728 x 90 (”leaderboard”). [...]
March 23rd, 2009 at 8:41 pm
[...] allowable three ad units per page. We highlighted an example from HubPages.com that showed page CTR improving when the number of ad units was 2 instead of [...]