When is the right time to put ads up on your site?

I came across this question the other day on another forum. It was interesting to me because I noticed there were two distinct replies that kept surfacing:

1. Place ads on your site right away. If not, you are wasting opportunities to earn money.

2. Wait until you get 500-1000 visitors a day, then start to run some ads.

I had always been of the mindset that you should wait until your new site gets an established flow of visitors before running any ads that might potentially have your new members clicking off your site. But I started to think about it some more, and realized the answer is not that simple. A second variable needs to get added to the decision process. What type of site do you have?

My initial thoughts are if you run a new forum, where you are trying to get folks to sign up and participate, well then you don't want them leaving your site so soon through an ad. Hold off on the ads until you get some adequate traffic and activity.

However if you run an informational site (content only), with no stickiness or social aspects, then you may not care if your visitor leaves once they see an interesting ad. Your site could have answered their query/question with one page, and they are now ready to jump somewhere else. Why not make a little money off their departure? A site like this could probably benefit from ads being run from the start.

This of course opens up another question, why would anyone want to design a site that did not encourage visitors to stick around? Well it is not that we don't want folks to stick around, but it could just be that our site is really good at answering their main question/query. For instance if someone is looking for a recipe, and I have a recipe website, they may find what they are looking for and move on. They may bookmark me and come back the next time they want a recipe, but for this visit, they got what they wanted and they are leaving. Running ads from the start with a site like this might not hurt my traffic growth, since I'll get the bookmarks from folks who thought I was a useful reference they'll use again.

Other factors to consider is your ad placement, and of course the number of ads. I always recommend starting small. Don't open the doors to your forum and then pour on the ads. One or two wisely placed ads per page is usually all that is necessary. If the ads are placed well, they'll perform well and not be overly distracting. High performance will lead to higher payouts, which will lead to more money in your pocket.

Good luck!

Banner CPM Trends - End of the Month Earnings Boost

Anyone ever notice a boost in earnings from Banner CPM programs around the end of the month? For the last year or so I've been tracking my CPM programs and found a few trends worth noting:

1. The first few days of the month are crap. I see CPM's in the 50-70 cents range.

2. By mid-month I'm seeing CPM numbers well over $1

3. By month-end I'm earning big bucks with $1.50-$2.00 CPMs.

My current CPM partner (TribalFusion) also allows advertisers to directly run ads on my site, which often results in a much higher payout ($3-$4 CPM). For some odd reason those also seem to hit my site near the end of the month.

My guess at an explanation is excess inventory. I figure most advertisers set a monthly budget, and come the end of the month you can bet the ad companies are going to make sure they hit that budget... so they start dumping all the ad inventory. Which in turn means less charity ads showing, and more paying ads... =)

So now the trick is to find which programs (affiliate, PPC, etc) pay better at the beginning of the month, and start to rotate my ad space based on optimal payout trends... Okay maybe I'm getting a bit carried away... but it might be worth experimenting with...

Using IFRAMES For Ad Blocks

Over the years I've noticed the more ad blocks I run on my sites, the slower they seem to load. Particularly I've noticed the banner ads from my CPM partner (Tribalfusion) seemed to occasionally halt the loading of my page while it found/loaded its next banner.

Unacceptable if you ask me. I tried emailing them to inquire about the problem, but only received the standard canned reply that everything was working fine on their end.

So I came up with an alternative solution that allowed me to isolate the load times of these banners. I put each ad in its own IFRAME. It appears that in both IE and Firefox (I have not tested this in Safari or Opera), the IFRAMEs will load independently from the main page. This allows my page/content to load quickly, and then the IFRAMEs can take their pretty old time loading, because it is no longer my problem.

Heck, in some cases I'll move on to the next page before the banner ads load. Could you imagine if end users had to put up with this kind of wait? I'm paying big bucks for a fast server with 2 processors and tons of RAM... yet none of that would matter if the users had to wait for a banner to load from a 3rd party site.

Bottom line, experiment and give IFRAMEs a try if you are seeing problems with your banner ads loading. In most cases CPM banner campaigns are not the big earner on any site, so don't allow it to be the biggest bottleneck on performance.