Noob Advertising Conundrum

RedTruck · Jan 8, 2008

I've owned a personal domain for many years and it has been getting around 100 unique visits a day due to some instructional content I put up. It's very nichey, but I do appear number 1 on Google searches for certain key phrases.

A couple of months ago I started playing with Adsense to see what would happen, and I began tracking with Google Analytics. I also added some affiliate links from Amazon. The Adsense CTR isn't great, but visitors spend a surprising amount of time on the site, averaging between 2 and 3 minutes. I get click thrus on the Amazon ads but very few purchases.

The Amazon click thru's would seem to imply a willingness by site visitors to follow ad links, although currently they're not finding what they want at the end of the links. It seems to me that the small amount of traffic I get could be very useful to certain advertisers. I have a good idea who those advertisers are, because the content is very specific. Questions is: what do I do about it?

I realize this is small potatoes to many, but if anybody has any thoughts about how to capitalize on the captive site visitor's eyeballs, I'd appreciate it.

sunja · Jan 8, 2008

follow the instructions on the adsense heatmap, theme your ad colours to your site's colours, place your ads as close to the content as possible.

Expand your site, create more content, use ad channels to see where your visitors click most. Split large pages into several smallers ones.

2-3 mins is good, perhaps you'd benefit from an e-newsletter signup to encourage repeat vistors.

RedTruck · Jan 9, 2008

Thanks for the advice Sunja. I've setup Adsense channels, so I can see what's being clicked and what's not. But haven't tried the heat map yet.

I was actually hoping that there would be an affiliate program that helped you to recruit advertisers. For example, if I think a spot on my site would be great for a certain product, but the vendor of the product doesn't do any advertising other than Adwords, it would be great to be able to approach the vendor, through an affiliate program, to try and get them to put more wholesome ads on the site.

I guess I could approach them as an individual and see if they want to setup an Amazon store that I could link to, but that would require some work on their part and they may not be open to it. Just trying to make it as easy for them as possible.