Knowing When is Enough
Knowing when is enough can be a tricky thing. It also depends on what you’re trying to do with your site. If your goal is only to sell stuff on your site then maybe having ads cover 95% of your site is a good thing. But if pushing content is your thing then maybe 30% is better. There needs to be a fine ratio between content and ads. This ratio can even be seen in the keyword/content relationship. Search engines start to reject sites that have over a 20% relationship. And people start to reject sites that have too many ads at a certain point too. Although no one has come up with a survey or poll to figure that out yet, it doesn’t taker a rocket scientist to know your sites not working. Maybe they did have a survey page, but it
had too many ads, I would have to say that the ratio should be between 20% and 30% depending on your page.
You page should be easy to navigate through. Your content should be easy to find. Yes, there are tricks to make the ads look like your material in order to trick people
into clicking on them, but remember if people can’t find what they want then they
might not come back. Would you rather trick someone one time for a click or have
them return for many more clicks.
You can experiment with your ads. Try some pages with 45% ad ratio and some with
30%. See how each of these pages work. You can even try different placement.
Some people believe that Content should be aligned Top:Left. Others Center
Frame:Left Heavy. Bottom line is the content must be in plain sight.
We live in a world that is quick, multi facet and multi tasking. People would rather
click then scroll. So anything belong the fold (the term used for anything below the
page that is displayed in your browser) is not important. Hence build smaller pages.
Now with smaller pages the ad content ratio can really get out of hand. So you need
to know when is enough.
Michael is currently growing his new venture as editor of Christian InTech. Michael
spends most of his time gathering technical articles and information for his site. You
can find his site at http://www.christianintech.com
This article is allowed for reproduction as long as the links are included. © 2006
Christian InTech
