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, the traffic on your website will suffer and you will lose money. If your website has too low a portion of advertising relative to content, the sales on your website will suffer and you will lose money.

What is the optimum ratio of ads to content? I can’t point to any studies, but I feel the optimum ratio is somewhere around 20 to 25 percent ads relative to content. Go much above that ratio and, despite more ads, the 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, the ads become content. Here’s an example. Rather than post ads that pay you the highest commission, post ads that provide the best value to the visitors to your website. These are ads where the value is so good you might respond to the ad yourself. This type of ad is more of a service than an advertisement.

Another example is ads for gifts around the holidays. People expect and are not turned off by an increase in ads around the 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 the normal ratio of ads to content if you hide the ads in the 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 the exact same banner on every page. If I didn’t respond to the banner on the first page, what makes them think I will repond to it on the second, third … hundredth page?

Displaying the 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 the 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 the highest reponse. I’m sure these results are not related to whether the ad is text or graphics, but more likely related to the fact that text ads are usually placed in the 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 the ad get a low response, but it also causes visitors to click away from your website.

Examples of annoying animated ads are banners that flash or jiggle or do something else that distracts the visitor so they can’t read the webpage content. Those visitors that don’t click away will scroll the webpage so this type of ad goes off screen while they try to read the webpage.

A secret few advertising designers know is that the graphic that will get the most attention is a picture of a human face. People are genetically predisposed to look at a human face in their view area. Try it yourself while you’re browsing the web. If a webpage has a human face on it, that’s the first thing you will look at.

Where to position ads on your webpage

To discuss where to place ads on a webpage, we need to divide a page into five sections as listed below.

1. Header

2. Footer

3. Left Margin

4. Right Margin

5. Center column

Note: There is a sixth area of the webpage which is the popup window. There are many forms of popup windows; pop-over, pop-under, delayed, and exit. The polite way to use popup windows is the self-closing popup window. Because of popup window blockers, popup windows are much less effective today, and, from my own experience, when I tried using popup windows, the page views on my website dropped by 50 percent.

The most common position to place advertising banners is in the header section of a webpage. Web users have programmed themselves to ignore banners in this position. The response rate of banners in the header section of webpages has dropped to something like .0001 percent. The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has tried to overcome this problem by defining giant (what I call “battleship size”) banners. I don’t know of any studies that show this works.

Using banners in the head section of your webpage is a waste of processor time, but most webpages still use them. Making a sale this way is a long shot. Banners in the footer section of a webpage are even less responsive.

Actually Web users have programmed themselves to ignore all advertising on the web. However, from my own experience, you can get some response from ads in the left and right margins of a webpage. Most websites are designed with the menu in the left margin and possibly ads in the right margin. This means if the user has a low resolution display, depending upon the width of the webpage, the advertising may be off the screen.

Place your menu in the right margin and use the left margin for advertising. This places the user with a low resolution display in the positon of having to scroll to view the menu. Too bad. They should get a bigger display. Website revenue comes first.

The most responsive position to put your ads is in the center column of the webpage along with the content. As visitors are reading the article on the webpage, they come upon the ad. It’s unavoidable.

If you imagine the center column of your webpage divided into three parts; top, middle, and bottom, the most responsive position for your ad will be right in the middle. As the visitors are reading the article on the webpage, they are forced to look at the ad as they continue to the lower part of the article. This might be a little annoying to the reader, but let’s hope your content is worth that slight annoyance.

I would recommend placing your ad at the bottom of the center column. As visitors read the article on the webpage, they end up looking at your ad. This is almost as effective as placing the ad in the middle of the column, and a lot less annoying to the reader.

As you can see, how you integrate advertising into your webpages has a major impact on your ability to produce revenue from your website. Poor ad integration will cause visitors to click away. Proper integration can make your website highly profitable. But, ad positon is not the only determining factor, don’t forget the ratio of ads to content, ad management, and ad type relative to response rate.

Copyright(C) 2004 Bucaro TecHelp.

Permission is granted for the below article to forward, reprint, distribute, use for ezine, newsletter, website, offer as free bonus or part of a product for sale as long as no changes are made and the byline, copyright, and the resource box below is included.

About The Author

Stephen Bucaro

To learn how to maintain your computer and use it more effectively to design a Web site and make money on the Web visit bucarotechelp.com. To subscribe to Bucaro TecHelp Newsletter visit http://bucarotechelp.com/search/000800.asp

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The way you design your web site affects your visitors’ online experience. As each visitor to your site is a potential customer, the easier they find your web site to use and the more they enjoy being on it, the higher the chance that they will make a purchase.

Therefore, a well designed web site really CAN boost your sales!

In this article I’ll share my five favorite web design tips to help you increase your online sales.

Tip 1: Choose Your Colors Carefully

The colors that you use will determine how your web site comes across to your visitors. Dull colors will make your site seem plain and boring whilst overly bright colors can make it seem chaotic and unprofessional.

Red and Yellow draws the eye in. Therefore it can be a good idea to use these colors for banners and adverts that you want your visitors to focus on. However, use these colors sparingly because they cause eye strain which means that visitors won’t want to look at your web site for long periods of time.

Tip 2: Avoid Slow Loading Web Pages

The amount of time that your site takes to download is critical. If it takes too long to download, you’ll lose potential customers who can’t be bothered to wait.

There are things you can do to speed up how long your site takes to download. Images and media are the worst culprits when it comes to slowing down your loading time. I advise you to avoid using any kind of multimedia on your web site and if you want to use images, try and keep them small and to a minimum.

You should also define height and width in all tables and graphics as this aids download time.

Tip 3: Make It Easy For People To Find Their Way Around Your Site

Your site’s navigation should be as simple and as straight-forward as possible so that people can find what they’re looking for easily. Don’t lose sales because people can’t find what they want.

Put a link to your homepage on each page on your web site. This will help visitors who didn’t enter your web site via your homepage to find their way around.

You can simplify your navigation by making every page accessible via two links from your homepage and no more than three links from any other page.

Tip 4: Make It Easy For Visitors To Contact You

Place your email address, or at least a “Contact us” link, clearly on every page. If people have to hunt around to find your contact details, chances are they’ll get fed up and leave your site without buying anything.

Tip 5: Make Your Sales Copy Easy To Read

Chunks of text are off putting and are therefore unlikely to get read. This means that if your well-worded sales pitch is written in long unbroken paragraphs, it will go un-noticed.

Use space and bullet points to break up text in order to encourage people to read it.

Andy Best is the author of the “Definitive Guide To Starting & Promoting An Internet Business”. This is a step-by-step guide full of advice and strategies to help you start an Internet business from scratch and promote your web site.

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From early days of www, the Internet sites that are added day by day are increasing tremendously. When you will consider this pool of web, may be they are about computers, industry, entertainment, search engines, fashion, organizational or even individual, all of these sites are concerned about one major part of web development apart from the logic or programming efforts behind it is ‘User Interface Design’.

Any web site will gain your interest by its appearance in front of you as well as ease of using and understanding the contents in that particular page. Therefore many of the web developers out there are always trying to go for the best user interface design which must also be affordable, can be either done by the developer firm or by web developer individual himself or he have to outsource the site for user interface creation.

The main stages in the creation of the user interface can be roughly listed as follows:

1. Note down all the aspects of your web site,

2. Try to list items as per their priority on the web page as well as consider their categorization.

3. From this list highlight points that are required to be catchy (e.g. in most of the general web site the Chat / Mail / News are considered to be the most catchy points whereas on the online shopping site the special offers and hot selling items may be the most catchy points).

4. Then decide the color combination of your interface (As per my point of view this is the most crucial part which many of them out there do not take into consideration which results in to a web site which is nothing but a site full of color in fact site looking like a circus! (You can understand what I want to say). So if you are rally very careful about the richness of the user interface then you should not fail to consider this point.

5. Once you have decided the color combination you have already won half the battle. Now you have to draw a picture of how your web page will look like finally, where on the web page I will place the catchy points I have listed previously, what will be common between the web pages (A date and time may be there from home page to the last page of your web site).

6. Finalize placing of all the remaining points in the list prepared by you.

7. If required repeat the steps for all the succeeding pages in your web site.

8. Then and only then go for designing of the web pages using various tools.

You may take help of various image-editing softwares like Adobe Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, even normal paintbrush for giving effect to the various images, backgrounds used in the page design. You can also embody various animations in your web page to give it a nice touch. You can try Macromedia Flash, GIF Animator or Animationshop for the same.

Some important tips-n-tricks of making your web page look catchier than ever will be discussed in my next articles.

Remember more effective and easier user interface - more the number of visitor (or even customer) who will specially halt at your site to check it out.

Nikhil R. Salvi
B.E.Computer Engg.
India

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