How I triplicated my ads revenue doing a simple change on my web
I’m going to explaining how I managed to triplicate my revenue from ads with a pretty simple change on my website that I believe most of you can replicate on your own sites.
Disclaimer: what I actually triplicated was the number of pages per session, which directly affected my ads revenue (you get paid for the number of impressions). To make it clearer, with the same number of visitors I triplicated the number of ads impression, and — before you ask — without adding more ads. Let’s see how I did it.
Pleasant surprise.
A couple of days ago I shared on the subreddit r/India (post here) my website knowyourworth.site. That drove a lot of traffic to my site, so I decided to take a look at the analytics. I found that I got 9k+ page views that day, but what it caught my attention was the number of Pages per Session: 7.3.
Before that day (11th May), that metric was around 2.2, as you can see in the following image.
Finding the reason
The thing is, that the main page of my site is a big table where you can compare salaries filtering by location, education, experience, job title, and more.
Most of my visitors spent most of their time on that page, applying filters and browsing the data using the table pagination.
A lot of people were asking me if I could show the state of the filters in the URL, so they could copy it and share the search very easily.
So that's exactly what I did.
Once it was done, each time someone makes a search, the URL change (without refreshing the page, thanks to VueJs that reuse the component) but it actually counts as a new page, at least for google analytics. Therefore, with the same number of visitors, I get 3 times more page views.
The (not so) magical change
It is debatable whether it is right to count it or not, but anyway I decided to take advantage of this, refreshing the ad each time the URL changed (I’ll keep the technical side of these changes aside, but if someone is interested just ask me), That's it, that's was the small change.
As you can see, it is a non-intrusive way to show more ads to the users but in a nicer way, not just throwing annoying ads all over the page.
I believe this kind of change could be useful for a lot of people that have a website like curated lists, job boards, etc, any page where the people spend a lot of time playing around with filters or something similar.
Well, that’s it, thanks for reading, I hope it was useful.
If you have some suggestions or ideas you can reach me out on twitter.
