Many website owners could learn a thing or two from master chefs. The premier culinary awards (as well as the countless reality TV shows) now consider not only the taste of the food in their rankings, but the presentation as well. A delicious dish presented poorly loses some of its appeal, while a mediocre meal presented in a creative and visually appealing way is likely to outrank a similar course delivered in a boring, unoriginal arrangement.
Many websites focus significant energy on cooking up great content, while overlooking the presentation component that plays a major role in determining their bottom line. Just like in a cooking competition, a great product presented poorly or awkwardly will cause you to come up short (in this case, of your full earnings potential).
Here are five tips for beating banner blindness, coming up with an effective site layout, and maxing out your site’s monetization potential. (For more tips, sign up to get the free MonetizePros newsletter.)
Tip #1: Know Your Hot Spots
One of the basic rules of the Web is that not all positions are created equal. After multiple decades of Internet access (and millennia of reading), humans have become creatures of habit when it comes to digesting content. As a result, certain areas of your site will be inherently more popular than others–not because of what they contain but because of where they’re positioned.
Here’s the most basic illustration of how we tend to consume the content on web pages, with darker sections illustrating sections that get more attention. See our recent overview of this heatmap for more.)
Here’s another helpful illustration to understand how visitors to your site are consuming your content–where their eyes tend to focus and which parts of the page are most likely to be overlooked completely:
So when placing your ad units, be sure to place some in areas of high visibility, namely just above and to the left of your primary content, or even within your primary content.
Tip #2: Taste the Rainbow
One of the easiest and most effective ways to highlight the content you want your visitors to see involves tweaking color schemes. By using colors that “pop” from the rest of your site design, you may be able to draw attention to key features–such as a newsletter signup or social share box. Conversely, you may want to do everything possible to have ads blend in with the rest of the site; the more they look like your original content, the more likely they are to get clicks.
In other words, depending on your exact objective, you may want to embrace color schemes that either blend or clash with your overall site design. For example, if you’re trying to improve click rates on text ads running on your site, you’ll generally want the color of the ads to match colors of links and blend in with the other content on your site.
Our guide on AdSense experiments walks through some of the basics of experimenting with different text colors in order to improve click rates and earnings.
Tip #3: Use Creative Placements
Generally speaking, you can overcome banner blindness by implementing layouts that are uncommon and come as a bit of a surprise to your audience. Here’s one of the blindness-beating placements we recently highlighted, from BleacherReport.com:
It’s hard to escape the Don Julio ads; they take over the page and demand recognition.
Another “disruptive” practice can involve interrupting content with ads or calls-to-action prompting internal goals (such as a newsletter signup). Here’s another example of that:
Tip #4: Spy on Your Visitors
The NSA and its PRISM program can teach us something about beating banner blindness. There’s a lot that you can (legally) do to spy on your visitors and get a better feel for how they’re engaging with your site. The conclusions you draw from this data may help you to restructure elements of your site to drive visitors to the high-value segments.
Crazy Egg is perhaps the best known app for gaining insights into where your visitors are clicking (and, perhaps more importantly, where they’re not), but features in Google Analytics can give you similar stats.
Tip #5: A.B.E. (Always Be Experimenting)
There’s only so much reading about banner blindness and optimal site setup that you can do. Because each site and audience is so unique, your gut can only carry you so far. Eventually, you need to start testing out different implementations to see which one more efficiently achieves your specific objectives (if you’re looking to boost AdSense earnings, we have several ideas for experiments to run).
Programs like Optimizely (and many others) make it easy to conduct split tests on your site–for example, moving an ad unit up and a newsletter signup box down–and measuring the impact on clicks.
Bottom Line
Many bloggers and publishers don’t give much thought to arranging their site; they assume that because they know where the best content and most valuable features are, their audience will as well. Put yourself in the shoes of someone with a short attention span who’s never been on your site before, and imagine how they would consume the content you’re presenting. The structure and visual layout of your site can have a major impact on your bottom line; those who understand the psychology of online consumption and design their site with the audience’s tendencies in mind will enjoy the revenue that eludes many others.
About the Author: Michael Johnston