Integrating Advertising into Your Web Design

By Stephen Bucaro

If you are going to be placing ads on your website, you'll want to put some thought into how you'll integrate them. Poor integration of ads into your website will cause visitors to click away fast. Successful integration of ads into your site can be highly profitable. Before I show you where to position ads, I want to mention a few important points about ads.

1. Ratio of ads to content

How many ads should you place on your website? There is an optimum ratio of ads to content. If your website has too high a proportion of advertising relative to content, traffic on your website will suffer and you will lose money. If your website has too low a portion of advertising relative to content, sales on your website will suffer and you will lose money.

What is optimum ratio of ads to content? I can't point to any studies, but I feel optimum ratio is somewhere around 20 to 25 percent ads relative to content. Go much above that ratio and, despite more ads, revenue from your site goes down. But, there are ways to exceed that ratio and still make more money.

Ads as a service

Advertisements can provide useful information, as well as content. In that case, ads become content. Here's an example. Rather than post ads that pay you highest commission, post ads that provide best value to visitors to your website. These are ads where value is so good you might respond to ad yourself. This type of ad is more of a service than an advertisement.

Another example is ads for gifts around holidays. People expect and are not turned off by an increase in ads around holidays. Finding gifts for everyone on your list is difficult work, and people appreciate gift ideas. Again, this type of ad is more of a service than an advertisement.

You can safely exceed normal ratio of ads to content if you hide ads in content. An example of this is product "reviews". For example, computer magazines are almost 100 percent advertising posing as product reviews.

2. Repetition of ads and ad management

I have seen websites that display exact same banner on every page. If I didn't respond to banner on first page, what makes them think I will repond to it on second, third ... hundredth page?

Displaying same banner on every page of your website is annoying to your website's visitors, and a money losing propostion for you. Keep your ads fresh. Ads are boring enough without repeating same ad over and over. Display a variety of ads, and use an ad management system. An example of an ad management system is a banner rotator.

3. Ad type relative to response rate

I have heard claims that text ads receive highest reponse. I'm sure these results are not related to whether ad is text or graphics, but more likely related to fact that text ads are usually placed in more responsive areas of a webpage. All thing being equal, a graphic ad will always get better response than a text ad.

A graphic ad will get higher response than a text ad, and an animated graphic ad will get higher response than a static graphic ad. But animation can be taken to an extreme. Some types of animation are annoying and not only does ad get a low response, but it also causes visitors to click away from your website.

Step 1: Open your text editor or word processor and write down all words and phrases that you might have searched for if you were looking for a company which offers products and services similar to yours. For example, suppose your company organizes packaged tours to Australia. Here's a list of phrases that I might have searched for if I were planning to make a trip to Australia:

tourism in Australia travel to Australia travelling in Australia travel agencies in Australia travelling agencies in Australia Australian travel agencies

Of course, keywords that came to your mind may have been different. But that's not important - important thing is to get an initial list of keywords.

You may be wondering why I have not used single word keywords. Here's why:

Firstly, single word keywords tend to be hyper-competitive. A search for "tourism" or "travelling" in any search engine will probably generate hundreds of thousands of pages. While it is possible that you may get your page in top 10 for such a single word keyword, it is quite unlikely.

Secondly, because of sheer number of pages that single word searches can throw up, most search engine users have realized that they can get more relevant pages if they search for phrases rather than individual words. Statistical research has shown that most people are now searching for 2 or 3 word phrases rather than for single words.

Thirdly, single word keywords won't get you targeted traffic. When people search for "tourism", they are not necessarily looking for tourist destinations in Australia - they may be interested in any other country of world. Even if you got your site into top 10 for tourism, you gain nothing from such visitors. However, when someone searches for "tourism in Australia", he/she is your potential customer, and hence, it makes sense for you to try and get a top ranking for your site for that keyword. Hence, whenever you are trying to generate keywords, try to be location specific. Try to think of keywords which apply to geographic area that your product or service is designed to serve.

Step 2: Open any spreadsheet program that is installed in your hard drive. I assume you are using Microsoft Excel. If you are using some other spreadsheet program, just change spreadsheet related procedures outlined here to fit your program.

Create 4 columns - one for keyword, one for popularity of keyword, one for number of sites that appear in AltaVista for that keyword and last for something I call Keyword Effectiveness Index (don't worry - I'll explain what KEI means later on). In order to ensure that you can follow what I am saying, I recommend that you add following column headers to first four columns of first row of your spreadsheet:

Keyword Popularity No. of Competitors KEI

In case you don't want to take trouble of creating your own spreadsheet, download keywords.zip file from http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?4901&download.htm The file contains a sample spreadsheet in Excel 97 format.

Step 3: A great way to obtain a list of keywords related to ones you have developed in first step is to use WordTracker's keyword generation service by going to http://the-easy-way.com/wordtracker.html Click on "Trial" option at top of site. In page that appears, type in your name and email address and click on "Start trial >>" button. In next page, click on "Click here to start trial". In next page, type in first keyword that you developed in Step 1, i.e. "tourism in Australia", in text box. Click on "Proceed >>" button.