Monetize with PPC Ads Networks

Monetize with Ads Networks

PPC stands for Pay Per Click. Basically you need to sign up with a certain Ads Network and paste some code snippets on your website. The network will then serve contextual ads (either text or images) relevant to the content of your website, and you will earn a certain amount of money for every click.

The profitability of PPC advertising depends on the general traffic levels of the website and, most importantly, on the click-through rate (CTR) and cost per click (CPC). The CTR depends on the design of the website. Ads placed abode the fold or blended with content, for instance, tend to get higher CTRs. The CPC, on the other hand, depends on the type of the website.

The source of the traffic can also affect the overall CTR rate. Organic traffic (the one that comes from search engines) tends to perform well because these visitors were already looking for a specific information, and they tend to click on ads more often. Social media traffic, on the other hand, presents terribly low CTRs because these visitors are tech-savvy and they just ignore ads.

Most PPC ads are text, but some PPC networks also sell image and Flash ads. Ads are sold and displayed based on an auction system, where advertisers bid on selected keywords and phrases that appear on network websites.

The ad network looks for website pages displaying its ad code, then matches what it determines the content of a web page to be with the most appropriate keywords and phrases that advertisers have bid upon.

The network then automatically weighs several factors in determining which ads to serve on the page, including the value of those bids; advertisers' remaining budgets for those bids; what percentage of readers have clicked on those ads in the past; and, in Google's case, the percentage of those readers who have made a purchase or read a designated number of pages on the advertiser's site.

Whatever you do, do not even think about clicking the ads on your website, or encouraging your readers to do the same. All PPC ad networks prohibit click fraud, and will boot from their program any publisher found to be inflating their number of clicks.

Since PPC ad networks target their ads primarily by topic, rather than geography or demographics, that makes these networks work better with niche topic websites than with sites that target their readers by geography or other demographics, such as gender, education, income or political affiliation.

For the system to work well for you, the PPC network's spiders must be able to determine a topic for each of your webpages and then must match keywords or phrases that advertisers have bid upon. That means the advantage goes to websites where each page covers a distinct and easily identifiable subject.

PPC advertising is also variedly called Pay-per-ranking, Pay-per-position, Pay-per-placement, Pay-per-performance, Cost-per-click (CPC)

Where you place ads on a page affects how many of your users see them, and click. According to recent Google research, top performing ad formats include:

Large box ads placed in the middle of your main content column;
Skyscraper ads placed in a left-side column;
Leaderboard ads placed at the top and the bottom of the main content column.

Customize the ads' colors to match the background, type and navigational colors of your site, too, to eliminate "banner blindness" and maximize their visibility to your readers.

Then keep an eye on your ads to make sure that they remain relevant to your site. To a reader, ads -- like anything else on your pages -- are part of the content of your website. If an ad network fails to deliver consistently relevant ads, dump it and try something else. Respect your readers by not bombarding them with irrelevant advertising and they will respect you by continuing to read your site.