Today everything is so fast paced and we are always after quick wins.
We want to maintain a high with these quick wins and constantly are on the hunt for the next win. Always putting us in the mode of changing direction, pivoting, and doing something new.
Whilst in business and sometimes life we need to make radical changes and that is understandable. Though could you imagine what life would be like if you were making these big massive changes every quarter, month of even week?!
How scary right?!
And people do this in business all, the time! They are always searching for the next win, the next way to gain traction and hunting quick win after quick win.
When you do this what happens is, those wins die off as quickly as they come, putting you back into hunting mode again and again. Which is why the best business owners and leaders do the complete opposite, they are heavily focused on macro growth over micro growth.
To do this they focus on how to improve their business over the long term through what is popularly called the Kaizen approach. Sure you don’t get the high of the quick wins, but the biggest advantages are you don’t get the stress of having to find quick wins every week/month. You don’t need to pivot and make big bold moves which is only a distraction to what your long term goal is.
I see this happen so much with website business owners, especially nowadays and from the outside looking in all I see is the business owner running around in circles trying to get out new content or get ranked with another article and are so focused on the micro that they are missing the big picture of why people actually love their website.
Why people stay, what can make them more money outside of ‘doing the work’ and chasing the next ranked article or an extra 1,000 monthly views.
In this article I am going to teach you why and how Ezoic are saving publishers and content website owners from bright and shiny object syndrome. How they keep us focused as content website owners on the macro vision/strategy with a kaizen approach.
Because after all the goal of a content sites monetized with ads is to make more money. And quite often the more traffic you bring in, the more your site gets ranked higher and the more ads you put on your page does not equal more money.
In fact it can send you further away from your goal and a big reason why I want to help you focus on the long term goal and long term health of your website.
Instead we will take the 2 biggest things that help content websites monetized with ads make more money in an evergreen way.
1. Less Ads Can Mean More Money
Too much is… too much!
That’s right, if you have ever been on a website with pop ups and there are ads in the top banner, side bar, footer and in articles you know what this is like.
It’s not only distracting but extremely frustrating, so what does it cause you to do?
You leave and what’s worse for that site is that your experience was so bad you will not be visiting again. Or if for some reason you click a link and are referred to that site you are out of there far quicker than you were the first time.
Could you imagine the bounce rate and time on page metrics for a site like this…?
Imagine how valuable Google thinks that site is and what it’s rankings are. Now imagine how much their EPMV’s is. Crazy right, they would be next to nothing.
This clearly outlines that by having too many ads it can decrease the value of your website and the longer it is in that state the less valuable it becomes.
So in order to make our site more valuable and have visitors coming back, people refer to it, generating good backlinks and all the great things that come from having a valuable website. You need to consider how many ads are on your website and truly test what the perfect amount is.
And not just the amount but also the best ad placements that can not just increase the ad revenue by having less ads on page. But also user experience.
I have talked about how important user experience is here and it’s actually more important than having ads. Why? Because without visitors the ads will not make money.
So remember, less ads can increase user experience and make you more money.
2. How To Increase Your Ads Value Over Time
By now you should see that whenever we work on growing our website we should be looking through a macro lens for long term health of our business.
Though what most content site owners don’t realise is that some of their ads on their website decrease in value over time, whilst some actually increase in value.
Which is why it’s not enough to just have the perfect amount of ads on our site and a kick ass user experience. We should certainly be monitoring and testing which ads increase in value versus those that decrease, and then solely focus on having those ads that increase in value on our site.
To do that there is a lot of testing that takes place, but it’s worth it. Because could you imagine the outcome of not doing this?
It would be the difference between putting decaying ads on your website that could cause the user experience and revenue to rot from the inside out. Versus planting a self watering plant in it’s perfect climate that is destined to grow into a big beautiful tree.
That is precisely what we want, big beautiful trees that are self sustaining and produce a great return month over month with little work. All because the site was set up well.
With that though, to get this right we need to understand that there are a lot of things that can impact and determine the value of an ad on your website.
Firstly the ad type does matter, and things like the ads location, size, density, colour, ads per page, page views on that page just to list a few are things that need to be tested.
We also need to be testing things for the ads performance, like device type viewed from, demographic, scroll depth, time of day viewed and time of week viewed amongst more.
All of which are focused again on what Ezoic lives and breathes which is a better user experience that breeds a better website which correlates to an increase in ad revenue.
Like I have been alluding to throughout this whole article, is that we need to focus on the macro vision and the long term health of the website. And to do that we should keep our goal of having a healthy, strong and valuable website, which can only be done by looking in and making small tweaks to user experience and our ads. Rather than big radical pivots/changes that completely derail us.
For those of you who are all in for a holistic approach to building your content site into a better more valuable asset via the Kaizen approach, get on to Ezoic to know how many ads is too many and which ads you should have on your site that will increase in value.
