Excessive Ads

Advertising is a fact of the web. And one that most people reasonably understand as being the price of freely available information. But nobody likes to come into a site that has so many ads that it is hard to even find what the content is.

So how do you define the line between a reasonable number of ads, and too much?

Personally, I like to make sure that there is no confusion between the actual content, and the ads. If something is on my site and appears to be content, I want it to be something that I am recommending to my site visitors. But then, I am marketing to a group of people who like to be given up front choices about where they go and what they do.

When your site visitors have to work hard to find the purpose of the page, or when they must keep making a concentrated effort to avoid the ads, then you have too many. Just ask a few friends, and they'll tell you if there are too many, or if they are obnoxious in their placement!

Ads are there to make money. So you want them to be where they will get clicked. There are two basic thoughts on this:

  1. Make them so they cannot be ignored. People who subscribe to this theory will put them in the most inconvenient places to scroll past. They will sometimes hide the ads by making them blend in completely with the page so it is difficult to tell that they ARE ads.

  2. Put them in logical places, where people can either pay attention to them or ignore them, as they choose. There are "standard" places for ads. And those are places that people will naturally look IF they do not find what they want on the page. Those places are the sidebars, and the bottom of the content area. People who use this strategy may also either contrast or blend their ads.

I don't believe in forcing anybody to do anything on my site. So I don't like the strategy of making ads intrusive. I'd rather put them where people can make their own choice about whether to view them or not. My sites with ads DO earn well, so for my site visitors, it works.

I also feel that when a site is ad supported, it is ok for the ads to be visible, and for them to be put in places where they are obvious, but not obnoxious. Because free information DOES have a price. SOMEONE has to pay for it!

AdSense has rules about how many ad blocks you can put on a site. The limit is 3 for Content Blocks. You can ad some link blocks as well. But generally, I find that 3 ad blocks is plenty anyway, and enough to hit the top, the middle, and the bottom as someone scrolls down. If a page is longer than that, then it can be divided up, or you can put some other type of ads in the middle of the content.

Ads are NOT content though. And the purpose of your site, while it IS earning from ads, is to provide good content. Without that, the site will not establish a solid and continuing traffic base.

Written by Laura Wheeler