This guide will cover how to structure your content and ads to make the most of the traffic on your site.
Optimizing the performance of your site really comes down to two things: getting traffic to your site and structuring your content in a way that allows you to make the most of your traffic.
Traffic:
When monetizing your site, it’s important to consistently attract new readers. One of the most important ways to drive traffic to your site is to rank well in search engines like Google. While it’s not easy to know and keep up with exactly what type of sites they’re likely to rank, we recommend thoroughly reviewing Google’s SEO Starter Guide as well as their Ranking Systems Guide. Keeping up to date with Google’s guides will help ensure your site continues to meet the criteria they’re looking for.
Enable Grow
Once you’ve effectively used the SEO tips to get readers to your site it’s important to keep them there, and to keep them coming back. Grow is an ideal solution for making sure that first time readers become repeat visitors that spend a lot of time on your site.
Grow can help expand your email newsletter subscriber list and bring consistent, engaged return traffic to your site. Grow’s conversion tools – Subscribe forms, Print Pass, Exclusive Content, and more – grab reader attention in the places they’re most likely to be seen on your site, making subscribing quick and easy.
Grow’s engagement features, like Recommended Content widgets and its Save button, help keep readers engaged by tailoring their experience to their specific interests.
Grow can also increase the value of your traffic with its identity solutions. When a user subscribes to Grow, we ask readers to consent to interest-based advertising. This allows advertisers to access secure first-party data and better target ads to the reader where cookies are not available. This results in more identified readers and higher earnings..
Ready to add Grow to your site? Head to the Grow tab in your Mediavine dashboard to get started. This article will walk you through enabling Grow and accessing Grow Publisher Portal, where you can enable the Grow features you’d like to use on your site.
After you’ve enabled Grow, check out our Best Practices to make sure you’re using Grow to its fullest potential.
Content Structure:
There is a lot of information online regarding how to best structure your content in order to maximize your site’s revenue potential. As a starting point, we recommend 3 simple tips:
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Write more. Generally, the longer your post is, the longer a reader will stay on your page and the more ads they’ll see.
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Break that writing up into shorter, more frequent paragraphs. This helps lengthen your content while making it more readable.
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Increase your font size and line height spacing to be at least 18px tall and 1.6px respectively. This also lengthens your content and makes things easier on your readers, especially those on mobile.
Paragraph structure:
Breaking your content down into shorter, more digestible paragraphs increases the likelihood readers will truly enjoy and understand your content. The more they understand and enjoy your content, the more likely they are to become a repeat visitor.
Generally, we recommend that your paragraphs contain no more than 2-3 sentences. Shorter paragraphs keep readers engaged and scrolling slowly through your content while content with long, dense paragraphs typically encourage readers to scroll quickly and only skim your content. If readers are scrolling quickly and skimming, they’re not being served ads, and they’re also not as likely to truly connect with your content and return.
If you’re focused on the reader experience, having shorter paragraphs is critical, especially for mobile readers.
In-Content Ads
We understand placing ads on your content requires a balance between user experience and revenue, so we have done our research to make our in-content ads as palatable as possible.
Our system ensures ads are appropriately spaced in accordance with the Coalition for Better Ads (CBA) guidelines, while also placing them as frequently as we can to maximize your revenue potential.
The CBA likes to see no more than 30% ad density to 70% content, and Google uses those same guidelines for its Ad Experience Tool.
Our dashboard settings default to 28% advertising density for Mobile, and 20% density for Desktop. You can adjust these settings up or down at your discretion in your Dashboard Settings area.
The Sticky Sidebar Ad
The Sticky Sidebar Unit (in your dashboard as "Sidebar Sticky") is one of our best paying desktop ads.
This unit will appear at the end of your sidebar. As the user scrolls past the end of the sidebar, it will stick to the top of the screen and auto-refresh every 30 seconds.
The longer a reader has the sticky sidebar ad loaded and scrolling with them down the page, the more valuable it is to advertisers. If your content contains short paragraphs as outlined above, this unit will perform well.
You should always have this unit enabled as it earns well and sits on the side of the page away from your core content so it has little to no impact on the reader experience, but can have a big impact on your desktop earnings.
The Universal Video Player
The Universal Video Player is another ad unit that performs very well with little impact on the reader experience.
It is a small, sticky video player that plays short video ads as the reader scrolls through your content. You do not need to have video content on your site in order to enable this unit.
We highly recommend enabling the UVP so that you can take advantage of higher advertiser spend on video ads without having to generate your own video content.
Other Top Tips:
- Make sure there is no content below your "most valuable content." - This could be a recipe card or a list of items essential to the post. A reader rarely scrolls past your most valuable content, and if you're loading something like a related posts plugin that adds to your pageload time, it could negatively impact the user experience.
- Include vertical images where possible. They're taller, adding more pixel height to your overall post, and readers/Pinterest seem to prefer them.
- Don't hide your featured Pin. Put it above your most valuable content. This lengthens the post and puts the pin where readers are likely to see it. Readers are more likely to pin something they actually see, rather than something that only shows up if they choose to pin.
- Skip the pagebuilders. The HTML they output can cause potential SEO issues, and often times does not work well with our ads. You can read this help article on Why Post and Page Builders Can Be Bad For Ad Performance to get more details.
If you have any questions, email us anytime at publishers@mediavine.com.