In my book (book.kelli.net) I talk about placing an appropriate number of ads on a web page. Apparently I wasn’t clear on the subject because some people think much like the state of Texas does and consider bigger is always better. But you know what? They are wrong.
I had an experienced webmaster contact me after he read about the release of my book. he told me that he purchased it and read it from cover to cover and that pretty much he had been doing all that I said in my book but he was still struggling to make any money from his website.
I asked him for his website address so that I can take a look. While it is true he had followed some of what I said, he did have one glaring mistake. On the first page of his website he had not 1 or or even 3 or 4 ads. He had 12. TWELVE ADS ON A SINGLE PAGE!
Why is that a bad thing? There are 3 main reasons really …
- It clutters the page. To much confusion on a page design is a bad thing. A bad design also lowers surfer trust. So that means they are also less likely to spend money on anything because they trust you less.
- It makes the page load slower. Slower loading pages means you have a higher bounce rate and it hurts your overall SEO efforts.
- To many outgoing links can cause search engines like Google to give you SEO penalties which could then cause you to get less traffic in the first place.
I get that you want to make money with your website, I really do but throwing everything including the kitchen sink at your website isn’t going to help you do that. Limit your total number of ads per page to 1 or 2. Not 5 or 6, not 12 — ONE OR TWO.
Then focus your efforts on making your site better. The higher quality your site is, the more likely your surfers will be to click on your ads because now they trust your site more.