Your Ad Strategy is Broken

as content creators we're always trying to find the right balance between a really great user experience that makes users want to stay on our website engage more and come back right as well as make search engines want to recommend the content on our websites but also we need to be able to make a living from them otherwise it's probably not really worth our time and striking that balance when it comes to monetization and today we're specifically talking about ads can be a real trick so today I want to walk you through that hello again my friends um you really stepped up for me a couple of weeks ago when I uh if you guys would just comment and let me know if the videos we're making are really helpful to you or not and so I want to thank you again I just can't thank you enough because that really did uh a lot for me so today I wanna continue to help right so today we're going to talk a bit about monetizing our websites and I want to talk about ads and how we try to strike that balance between having enough ads on our website and putting them in the right places but not having so many ads that it's a really poor user experience so let's get right into that now I am going to show a few specific things using izoic mostly because that's what we have on a bunch of our websites right now but I'm not trying to give a specific endorsement mediavine is another fantastic ads company some people have a ton of success even with Google AdSense raptive who used to be ad Thrive they do a good job just those ones mediavine and raptive those require you to have much higher levels of traffic than a lot of you watching this video right now and so it's not going to apply as much also when you want to make a change you just tell them I want to make a change I don't want an ad here or can we place an ad here instead and they help you through that process it's usually not quite as straightforward as let me go ahead and make some quick changes with izoic there's a lot more that's kind of under your control I the kind of I think will come into play you'll you'll see what I'm talking about here in just a minute so I'm going to show a few specific things first of all I want to talk about some of the highest paying ad opportunities and which ones I do and don't use so here in Ozark ads under ad types you'll see native ads this is like in your content itself often at the very bottom you'll see where after all of the written content then all of a sudden there's a bunch of it kind of looks like related content right other articles that you could read but usually they're not actually from the website that you're on they're just from other places on the web those are native ads they're ads that are literally just designed to try to get people to go to other content on other people's websites but it's not one that I love because oftentimes you're going to see a lot of really spammy really crummy content stuff that's very click-baity stuff that is very inaccurate and it's all going to show up and to me that kind of reflects on the website itself when I see that on a website that's trying to be a reputable sort of news type website to me it's kind of a turn off I'm like really you don't have a bunch of other articles on your website that you'd rather have me go read instead and that's the thing there I would rather have my own related content and feature that at least first and then maybe Place Those ads below with izoic here we have the option to include up to PG-13 level ads or you could say let's keep it PG and we've seen some fairly racy ads that come through those you've probably seen those on the internet and so what they'll consider PG-13 is often a little more racy than probably what I want to show on most of my brand websites but it really depends on your website uh kind of the feel of your website the tone that you're going for as well as just you know if you don't have a ton of other content that you're trying to point them to on your own site and people are kind of coming reading one article and leaving then yeah maybe turn these ones on they estimate you'll increase your Revenue about 10 by doing that vignette ads I don't turn these on oh they are turned on on this particular website I'm turning them back off I really really really really really really hate vignettes vignette ads are those pop-ups that happen between pages so you're reading a blog post you click another link to go to another page and what happens in between an ad pops up covers the screen you can't get to the new content until you watch the ad or at least wait five or six seconds for the little X to appear so you can close out of it for years the Coalition for better ads has treated this as a bad ad experience a negative user experience and they and they don't recommend it and when it comes to user experience even some of the ranking factors that Google's using are based a lot off of those recommendations from the Coalition for better ads I don't like to use them they do say that you can earn a lot and that makes sense because showing one ad for a dedicated amount of time it's going to get all of that person's attention so companies are paying more to have these ads placed so once again if you're not getting a ton of follow-through traffic or your blog content is very transactional people read a blog post or two and then they leave you don't have anything to sell them maybe vignette ads are okay for you I know from my experience my wife tells me the same thing she's probably a lot stricter on this than I am when we see a vignette ad usually we just close out we're done and you just lost a page view from me where you could have shown me 12 other ads on the next page let's talk a little bit about these Auto insert ads this is not a specific like industry-wide ad type like vignette ads are these are some of the AI placeholders that izoic will test out for you so essentially the way that these ads work with zoic is that they put a bunch of placeholders on your website where they could show an ad they don't always show an ad in every placeholder in fact there are often placeholders that don't have an ad in them at all and you don't even see on the front end that there could have been an ad there and what a zoic is doing is they're testing which of those placeholders are earning you the most money over time and so the longer you have ads running and the more traffic you get over time the more they're going to be able to optimize that well AI placeholders is essentially where the AI is saying hey uh here's another place that you didn't put a placeholder but this could make you even more money and so then it'll put a placeholder there and then start showing ads there to see how it does and if it doesn't work well it'll just move to a different spot and put an ad there at least that's the way that I've come to understand it what I don't love about this is it does take away my control my ability to be able to say I never want an ad to appear in this space we'll see those when we look at the front end in just a few minutes next let's talk about anchor ads now anchor ads these I do like this is an ad that appears at the bottom of the screen it's usually small not very intrusive and it's just there the whole time so as a user Scrolls through the website that ad just stays at the bottom of the page that I'm okay with those ads actually tend to be one of the highest earning ad placements on all of our websites the reason for that is because that same ad will display for several seconds oftentimes as you scroll by you'll see a little bit of an ad and then you'll scroll by you'll see the bottom half of it and then you'll move on as you see at least a certain percentage of that at any given period of time you make some money and the more time that passes the more money you make to a point there reaches a point where you've made all the money you're going to make from that ad so here's what these companies do with those anchored ads that are at the bottom of the page as that time passes once they reach that place where you've earned the most money you're going to make from it it loads a new ad and you're always going to earn the money from that ad as long as people stay on that page long enough to pass that time whereas there are other ads that if people scroll by too fast you'll earn no money from we turn this on and I leave it on for desktop mobile and tablet and I do allow them some flexibility on the sizing I haven't really noticed a lot of problem with them getting too big let's talk about side rails these are ads that are way out to the side of the screen we'll typically notice these a lot on the desktop let me show you what I'm talking about this over here on the far left that is a side rail ad kind of like those anchored ads it stays with you the whole time I don't really have a problem with these I prefer to have it only on the left side typically because I don't want to detract from the main content but also things that I have in the sidebar on the right so I'm going to go ahead in this case on suggested by locals and I'm going to turn off the right side rail next is the sticky sidebar the sticky sidebar is an ad like these that you're seeing here in the sidebar but typically it's the one at the very bottom and once you reach it it stays with you and it's like I said before you have all these placeholders but as though it's not going to load all of them on every page sometimes you're going to see like what I'm seeing here what looks like a lot of ads but other times you're gonna you're not gonna see everything that you've enabled floating video we just saw I have it enabled right now it's this little video kind of here at the bottom that can play and by default the audio is turned off people have to click on it to to have the audio play you can click this little button to unmute it but those ads are pretty good earners as well because since there's video and things are moving they tend to be more eye-catching so again people pay more money to get these ads to place and having this little floating video down here I prefer over having a video in the middle of the content because once again it it stays with you as you scroll through the page so those are my preferences and the reasons why you might have a little bit different reasons and therefore your preferences may be a little bit different I also want to talk a little bit about ad placements now and what makes for a good user experience I'm here on suggested by locals I'm here on the home page I have a side rail over here I have this floating video I have an anchored ad there I also have this ad here way up at the top and then here like there's a little blog post excerpt right there and then an ad before The View Post button I don't like it when on any blog archive page they place an ad literally in the middle of this block I would be okay with it appearing in between you know two of my blog posts but having it before The View Post button I don't like that and they've done that a couple of times so what do I do when I see ad placements I don't like well with ozoic it's kind of nice they've made it easy there's a Chrome extension if I can click this button here and then I can activate my placeholders now it's going to show me what placeholders exist on this page you'll notice here that there's an AI placeholder at the very top of the page which means they could put an ad there but there's also a regular placeholder at the top of this page which they've been placing an ad there too so let's say I don't want this top of page placeholder to show up on this page or maybe I don't want to show up on my website at all the top of page AI placeholder so I'm going to say don't show it on this page that's because my home page should be the page where I want to direct people to the main call to action that I have for them on my website so if I have a kind of a normal blog I'm going to want to try to direct them to my best content or the content that's the most valuable to me to have people reading those might be articles that just are very well monetized with ads the ones that make the most money they might be articles where I'm selling an info product or they just might be really good articles that are very pillar and foundational to the content of my website and the Interlink out to a bunch of other articles that way those users will be more likely to engage with as much of my content as possible but if I can get a user to look at multiple pages on my website I'm going to make more money than if people come look at one page get turned off by the ads halfway through an article and leave and never come back and when people have that sort of behavior it absolutely impacts the rankings of your websites and the organic traffic you're going to get going forward the better user experience means a lot more overall traffic which means that even with fewer ads I get a lot more ad views and a lot more Revenue the home page is particularly important what I want to do is I want to feature specific categories specific articles and try to get people to go there as well as featuring the most recent content notice that all of these placeholders here these are all AI placeholders why is that because I already removed all the normal placeholders from the home page I don't want a bunch of extra ads on the home page so I'm going to remove this AI placeholder and this AI placeholder but I'll go ahead and leave the one at the very bottom below the footer I'm less worried about that so notice I've removed basically everything I also don't like one at the very top of the page the home page is not a place to fill with ads to try to make the most money from people hanging out on the home page the home page is where we want to steer people to the best and most valuable content on our website if you want people to buy your info product you point into the info product if you want people to schedule a consultation with you that's where you talk about it right there on the home page get them there get them interested in it and then direct them over to a sales page so I'm going to actually remove this placeholder from the very top to remove it from this page so at this point the only ads that are going to show up are the one at the very bottom as well as the anchored ad the floating video and the side rail which we could also turn off if we really want to the things I'm talking about here on the home page are also for me at least the things that I do on all of my really high value Pages if there's a very well monetized page I'm not necessarily talking about a good product review blog post but I'm talking about if I have a sales page for any sort of a product I'm going to remove as many ads as I can I'd want to direct people's attention to my product I'll make way more money if they buy that product than I will from a couple of ads the same would be true for like if I have a really good tools page or a resources page where I link out to my the recommendations that I tend to make across my website I link to those products that are the most beneficial for my audience it's maybe a good idea to make sure you don't have any placeholders in places where you really wouldn't want an ad to show but it's also important to set sort of the ad Focus for your website as well here's what I'm talking about on your zoic account if you click on optimization goals here under zoic ads you can choose here you want it balanced do you want it Revenue focused or user experience focused we had ours on balance and you saw how many ads like I said about every three paragraphs it's a lot if I switch it to user experience focused what it's going to do is it's going to fill in a lower percentage of those placeholders on average with the balance focused and the ad settings the way that I have them my average epmv that's earnings per Milli or per thousand visits so that's sessions not page views with those exact settings on this website has been 17.57 hopefully that gives you an idea of about the kind of income that you could earn from that level of ads versus if you decide to remove some and this number will probably go down a little bit but the ads that I removed like think are going to help me overall to get more traffic have a little bit less of an impact from Those ads when it comes to user experience and I'd love to hear from you in the comments below what's your focus on your particular website are you choosing to be more user focused are you choosing to be more Revenue focused from an ad standpoint or are you choosing to try to stay somewhere in the middle fairly balanced as and why why is it that you're choosing that is there something about your particular industry that you think that makes the most sense for you I'd just love to have a little bit more discussion around this I'd also love to hear from you what other things would you love to hear more about from us here on this channel we are all about the testing we have a bunch of websites and we're working on a bunch of amazing projects to try to help you better know how to succeed when it comes to using content to make a great income on the Internet thanks for being here and thanks again for commenting and I hope to see you in the next video thank you

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