We've all seen, at some point, a website that was oversaturated with ads and even though it contained the information we needed our first instinct was to get out as fast as possible because of obvious reasons.
The stupidity behind such greed
Let us briefly explain why a website oversaturated with ads will ultimately yield less revenue.
Most advertisers spend their own money within the campaigns they promote to get some sort of results. Whether these results consist of sales, leads, sign ups or anything else is irrelevant, the point is those people want something in return for the money they spend.
Having this in mind think about your own personal experience when navigating a website. How likely are you to take interest in an advertisement if half of the content on that particular page consists of ads? The odds that you will actually convert one of them are close to zero because the most probable scenario is that you'll be annoyed and just leave the page.
This means that eventually no advertiser will be interested in purchasing an ad space that offers nothing in return. Therefor spamming your visitors with ads not only drives traffic away but ultimately drives money away.
The impact on performance and page loading speed
The advertisements on a page need time to load. The JavaScript libraries behind these advertisements also take time to load. Some websites, especially those that use a CMS ( content management system ) are known for not being the fastest because of how resource heavy they are. If you add additional libraries ( multiple advertisements ) to an overall long page loading speed you are likely to lose the visitor before the page even loaded.
Google is the ultimate example of contradiction when it comes to page loading speed, and here's why. They require good page loading times in order to rank better in their search results but offer one of the most resource heavy and slow to load ad library out there through their Google Adsense service.
And no, we are by no means badmouthing Google or it's services but we invite you to use their PageSpeed Insights on one of your pages, with and without having the ad code from Google Adsense installed.
Tips to preserve the UX ( user experience )
- Prevent layout shift by adding height and width to your ads and images. Even if layout shift can sometimes improve CTR on ads, those are clicks made by mistake and will 100% not convert.
- Get rid of pop-up ads, and overlaying containers. No explanation needed here...
- Do not place ads near buttons or menus. Generating such "fake" clicks will not get you anywhere for reasons which were explained earlier in this article.
- Content before ads! You have to realize that visitors land on your pages for the content not their ads. Let them have what they came for before trying to monetize them.
PopUnderSTAR's approach to pop-under ads to preserve the UX
Classic pop-under integration will launch a pop-under window or tab upon visitor interaction with the page ( click / scroll / etc. ) or place an overlaying invisible container which will launch the current page in a new tab or window while redirecting the old one to an advertisement.
While somewhat effective, this type of integration is a terrible nuisance for your visitors an overall loss in your struggle to improve the UX.
Instead of taking the classic approach, we, at PopUnderSTAR do things differently. Our library will convert your in-site links and add a target=_blank on those that don't have it so that when your visitor navigates through your website, the page he wants to visit opens in a new tab just as intended, while the tab that stays behind gets redirected to the advertisement.
Our studies have shown that this type of integration takes absolutely no toll on your visitor's UX while allowing you to display pop-under ads and maximize your revenue.
We are positive that out of all the pop-under ad networks out there we are the only ones using these practices.
