By Charlie Cummins – bbmm.ie
The Google Breakfast Briefing today (the fifth in the 2016 sessions) introduced a new topic to the series on how to generate revenue from your website/content. The presentation, titled “An Introduction to Website Monetisation” was targeted at website owners who wished to use the potential of their existing content (be it a website, news/blogs, app, game or video) as a source of generating income.
As it was an introductory type session, the presentation provided some tips and idea for getting started, on how to get ads served to your site and how to use available data to move the process along and be successful over time. Content development takes time and resources – generating revenue from it helps to offset these outlays.
Getting Started:
To successfully generate ad revenue, you need three elements.
(A) Content: It needs to be worthwhile and of interest to others, so they have a reason to go to it.
(B)Users: Your website needs to have a continuous stream of users, who repeatedly visit because your content is beneficial in some form to them.
(C) A Monetisation Strategy: What source of revenue will work best for your particular circumstance such as allowing display ads, getting paid subscribers, offering sponsorship on some content, using affiliate links/sale – or a blend of theses?
Targeting:
Subject to the needs of the advertiser, they may choose to use your content in a variety of ways to maximise their target audience coverage such as :
Contextual: placing ads on very specific pieces of content that relates directly to their area of business (e.g. your content is very relevant to their keywords).
Placement: Ads are placed on a handpicked set of “desired” websites on the basis of a perceived audience fit between the websites’ user and the product being promoted.
Remarketing: tracking a user’s web browsing history (through cookies) to serve them ads related to their previous internet searches and the products they displayed an interest in.
Getting Ads on Your Site:
Perhaps the simplest method of attracting revenue generating ads to your website is to use an “Ad Network”, such as “AdSense” from Google. These automated systems will supply the ads to your site, rather than the more time consuming approach of talking directly to advertisers on a individual basis.
The systems will insert the necessary code into your web pages to create the “space” in which the ads will appear. They are also likely to take care of all the paperwork and payments for you. For more information on how Google AdSense works, follow this link to their online help area: https://support.google.com/adsense#topic=3373519
Building for the Long Term:
To make your website’s monetisation strategy a success over the long haul, the following points should be noted:
Consider the User: your content must present a good experience for the user. The website must display in a “user friendly” fashion and must be fully optimised for mobile devices. It must also load fast – if a page takes longer than 5 second to load, 74% of users will abandon the task and move on to the competitor.
Learn from the data: Spend time studying and understanding the analytics data available to you. Get to grips with why users leave your site or visit only certain pages. Use the analytics to discover your high traffic pages and your most popular, highly valued content. Drive ads to these pages for maximum return. And link AdSense to your analytics and constantly check the results.
