- [Neil] Hey everyone, it's Neil Patel.
And today I'm going to share with you
a simple hack to generating 93% more ad revenue.
(upbeat music)
Before we get started,
make sure you subscribe to this channel,
and if you're on YouTube, click the alert notification.
Now this hack works extremely well.
I've tested it on a lot of websites,
some websites I'm seeing even a bigger increase
from this hack.
Some websites I'm seeing a little bit less.
But when you average it out,
the industry is getting roughly
93% more ad revenue from this hack.
And I bet you you're not using it at all.
So how do you make money
from your publishing website right now?
Well, you probably make money through AdSense.
And if you know me, I'm not a huge fan of AdSense.
But if you run AdSense along with other display ads,
it actually is a very good strategy,
as long as you're using the right optimization and testing.
And I used to do everything manual,
and it was a ton of work,
and I'll show you the process that I used to go through.
And then eventually I ended up learning about this tool,
which is now my secret weapon
for any new publishing website that we acquire.
And then we end up throwing it on there
and it ends up helping us generate more revenue.
So there's roughly 10 million
websites that are using AdSense.
That's a lot of websites.
Just think about it, 10 million, right?
That's a big chunk of the web.
Yes I know there's billions of websites,
but majority of them literally get little to no traffic.
Now, the people that are using AdSense in most cases,
they're getting enough traffic to monetize.
But if you want to do really well with AdSense,
or any ad format out there, it takes a lot of testing.
And when you optimize your ads to really maximize them,
I was working with a guy named Ahmed.
We had a website for a while called Real Cool Videos.
And with Real Cool Videos literally the amount of time
we spent testing on display ads in AdSense,
it wasn't a month or two,
it took us like six to nine months
to really get it down, and, you know,
even a year to fully perfect it.
And that was because we were doing a lot of things manually.
But luckily, nowadays there are some tools
and some processes that make things
much more quicker, and efficient.
Because there's a lot of things to test.
Everything from ad placement,
Where should your ad go on the page?
Should it be on the top right corner?
In the content sidebar?
Should you have multiple ad spots?
What sizes should you use?
Should they be big, small?
Where should you buy your traffic from?
Or should you do tons of SEO?
Is it converting into a lot of ad clicks?
What's the color of the ad?
Should you make it blend in?
Or should you make it stand out?
Which ad networks will pay you less or more?
How do you leverage targeting,
and show different people different ad types?
What about density?
Should you have five ad spots above the fold?
Two, one?
because if you really screw up the experience,
it could also hurt your SEO as well.
All these things are very, very important.
And as a publisher, this is why you have to perfect
everything when it comes to your ads.
Because if you don't,
advertisers aren't going to keep bidding more money
for ads on your site.
And if they don't,
then you're not going to make that much cash.
And this is what's funny.
See with advertising,
we manage a lot of ads at my agency, Neil Patel Digital.
Companies, no matter what ad system that they're using,
they constantly bid and treat each visitor type differently.
Why is that?
Because everyone converts differently.
Some visitors convert more than others.
Some traffic sources are better.
So why don't publishers treat ads the same way?
Because if you continually test
and you treat each visitor differently,
and you show them different ad types,
you can make more from your traffic,
which ultimately will increase revenue.
And if you make sure your experience is great,
you can decrease your bounce rate,
which in turn will boost your SEO as well.
If you create a terrible experience
and you just shove ads everywhere,
and people don't like it, and they bounce away,
it's going to screw up your bounce rate,
your page level experience,
which in turn is going to decrease your rankings
in the long run.
Because what's going to happen is people will Google
for something, they'll click on your listing,
and if they see your ad site as too spammy,
they're just going to click the back button.
And that tells Google or sends them more so a signal saying
hey, this site shouldn't rank as high.
So how do advertisers bid on these sites?
Well, it's simple.
They're using real time bidding protocols.
They're going through these platforms
that connect the advertiser with the seller.
And then boom, they're able to bid
based on things like performance,
such as conversion rate, clicks, CPMs,
all of those things to maximize their revenue.
Even things like dayparting.
So when they do this, they're able to then control
what sites their ads are being displayed on,
to maximize their revenue and who they're targeting.
So let's go over how you can optimize your ads
and some of the variables that you control,
and some of them that you can't.
So when you're running A/B tests
the real simple approach is pretty much
you're comparing one variation to a other.
You're comparing how a ad spot in one location
may do better versus a different one,
or how a ad size in one area
is doing better or worse than a other.
And you're tweaking these things
to see which variation is going to cause you the most lift,
and that's the one that you eventually
end up rolling out and making permanent,
because that impacts your revenue in the long run
and makes you more money.
But there's some issues.
There's some things that you can control,
and you can't control.
Some of the things you can control
when you're testing is, let's say,
should you have navigational options on the page or not?
How should you position your ads around your content?
What ad types you should use, the locations,
the sizes, and color schemes, all these types of things.
And sometimes with color schemes,
there's not much in your control,
but sometimes you can, depending on the network.
And some variables that you can't control,
is you can't control what device
someone's viewing your website in.
For example if they're coming to your website
on a mobile device, why would you show them the same ads
that you would when they're on a desktop device?
And why would you show them in the same format?
Because that could create a terrible experience
which decreases your rankings.
And as you know, Google has mobile first indexing.
So you may not rank as high on mobile
for mobile devices when they're Googling.
So that's important right?
You want to make sure that you're optimizing
for these devices because you can't control
if they're going on a iPhone,
or a Android device, or a desktop.
But you ideally want to make your website compatible
and keep all those things in mind.
Same with browser types, or the type of day,
time of day, or if it's a Saturday or Sunday,
or their connection.
When I was at my wife's ranch, her parents' ranch,
they barely even have cell reception, forget 4G or 5G,
heck I can't even get 3G.
Same with geographical location.
Sometimes you get traffic from other regions
that aren't easy as monetizeable.
But there's a lot of little things like this
that you can't control.
Now, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be doing
optimizations or testing.
The first thing you're going to want to test
is the ad unit that you can control,
with one that you can't control.
For example, you want to test ad size with traffic source.
You can't control the traffic source,
but you can control the ad size.
And this will end up giving you data
on what's working, or what's not.
And the reason you have these variables going,
ones that you can control
against ones that you can't,
is because you always have to keep
the ones that you can't control there,
because that's consistent.
So if you're optimizing only for things you can control,
that won't work out because in reality
the true future is you can't control all aspects.
So you have to have both the variables there too.
Then you want to use the A/B testing tool.
If you want to do it yourself and do it manually,
which takes forever, use Google Optimize.
That's what we use when we're trying to do it manually.
It's free in your Google analytics account.
You can connect them and just going through Google Optimize
you can literally test pretty much anything.
And I'm going to break down how you do that
through Google Optimize.
So you go into Google Optimize.
And what I want you to do is connect it
with your Google analytics account.
Then click on your container name,
to get the experiments page.
And once you're there, click on create experiment.
Of course, enter the experiment name.
And then enter in the page URL
that you'd like to test,
maybe it's a specific article, or your homepage.
Then you want to click A/B tests, and then click create.
And then after that,
you want to add variance to your A/B tests.
So a variant is multiple things that you're testing.
And I'll give you example of this.
So you click create a variant,
and the title of your variant,
because I'm going to test ad size, is 300 by 250 ad size,
and then click on ad.
Then click anywhere in the variant window
to launch the optimized visual editor.
Then click on the webpage element you wish to edit.
Then use the editor panel to make changes.
Then you click save.
And pretty much repeat these steps,
and then you can create a variant
for 468 by 60 or whatever it may be.
And then you can continually test.
And over time you just let it run.
And usually if you have a lot of volume,
you can see results within a week.
But for many businesses, many publishers,
it takes a month to two months to really see the results.
Keep in mind when you're running these tests,
a lot of times they may look promising in the first week,
or first few days,
but that's because a lot of your repeat visitors
are seeing something that's different.
So it does a little bit better.
But then as time goes on,
you'll start seeing things normalized more.
So that's why you want to run your tests longer
than a few days, or a week.
So that way you can get true results,
and ideally statistical significance.
Keep in mind that ads have the ability to dilute other ads.
As I mentioned earlier, advertisers adjust their bids.
Now in a study by Ezoic, it was found
that publishers that optimized for CPMs,
their revenue often went down.
So why is this?
Well ads impact the performance of other ads,
and ad bids get adjusted over six to eight week periods.
And that's why I mentioned when you're running your tests
you want to run them for a few weeks,
more than a few weeks technically.
You want to run them for usually a month to two months
because within that period you're going to start
seeing bids getting adjusted.
Because remember when companies are bidding
for ad placements, yes,
they may be in there on a daily basis,
but they're really looking at performance
over a monthly basis.
And knowing how companies manage their ads
allows you to better understand,
hey, how many ads should you have?
The locations, the sizes,
and all these things to make sure
you're not diluting other advertisers.
And the other ads on your site
which will then allow you to maximize your ad placement
in the most competitive areas on your site
for each visitor, to maximize your income.
At this point, you're probably a little confused
or feeling overwhelmed, and that's normal.
And why is this?
There's just a lot of different elements.
From sizes, to traffic sources, to what happens over time.
What happens during economic conditions?
Like let's say a virus goes down globally
and ad prices all start going down.
And then everyone jumps in and started doing e-commerce,
so ad prices start going up,
but then people start changing their strategies.
So how do you continue to optimize
for all these different types
of elements, and do it fast enough?
Because each minute you miss is money that you're leaving
on the table, and that you're losing.
So what I end up using is this tool called Ezoic.
I've been using it for a while now.
It's a good software.
It uses artificial intelligence
and machine learning to optimize base
on a lot of different data points.
So think of it this way, when I'm optimizing my own website
I end up having visitors.
Let's say I have a million visitors a month.
That's my data points.
But the thing is is market conditions change all the time.
What happens if I can optimize
based off a billion different data points?
And what happens if I can optimize based
on other websites within my industry?
And other websites that are also publishers
that are just running ads
in all different types of industries.
And that's what Ezoic does.
They take literally billions of pieces of data,
and I literally mean billions of pieces of data.
And then from there they automatically start optimizing.
So Ezoics main purpose is when you end up running your tests
that can take you months if not a year,
if you're doing everything manual,
and keep in mind it's not about just how fast you move,
it's also about how many visitors you have.
What they do is they take data points
across all the different websites in your category,
and even in other categories.
They look at all the different visitor types,
what you have, what other people have,
they get all these data points.
And instead of it taking weeks or months,
it does it literally in minutes,
because they already have this data on what's working,
and what's not working.
So in essence, what they're doing
is their ads are set up on a per visitor basis
meaning ads will be delivered depending on the person
who's visiting your site and looking at them.
And it takes into account user experience,
which is very, very important.
And I'm not a real big fan of AdSense.
And I know you already know that,
but the reason I'm not a fan of just randomly
throwing up a lot of ads,
because on mobile devices,
it can create a terrible experience.
And what I like about Ezoic
is if they know that the experience is getting hurt,
they just remove the ad from the experience, and the page.
So then that way you're not hurting your longterm traffic
which is very, very important
because the last thing you want to do is make a quick buck,
and then your search traffic going down in the long run.
And according to the Small Business Trends,
over 300 websites using Ezoic
for one year have shown an average revenue increase
in 93% in that time period.
That's huge.
Look, you can either do it all manually,
or you can just do it all automatically as well.
And when you're optimizing your site for revenue,
I recommend that you don't just use AdSense,
you run multiple ad platforms.
That's how you make the most money.
And you can also do that through a Ezoic as well
because it works with multiple ad platforms as well.
And I really want you to remember
that it is a game of numbers.
See, marketing has changed into to the person
with the best data, has the most ammunition,
and power to win.
And when you're taking data points from billions of visitors
and interactions with ads, you're going to do better
than if you try to do it all manually.
The big takeaway I have for you is when you're optimizing
for ad revenue, don't just optimize for income,
optimize for revenue, and user experience.
And you can do that in many ways.
You can do that an automatic ways through Ezoic,
or you can try to do it manually.
And of course, time is money.
If you want to go the long process of manually doing things
you can, I recommend that you read forums,
and look at other communities
to see what's working for other people.
Or you can look at easier quick solutions like me,
like I just use Ezoic,
and let the AI pretty much do the work for me.
So that's it.
If you have any questions about making the most money
from your website, leave a comment below with your website,
and I'll try to do my best to help you out.
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subscribe, like my channel, tell other people about it.
Thank you for watching.