Should you put Display Ads on Affiliate Websites? [Test Results]

Key Takeaways

if you have an affiliate website should you also put up display ads on them to answer that question first we need to look at what our display ads now when people first think about display ads most of the time the Big Shot Adsense comes to mind there's Adsense just like some other networks like media vine and AD thrive these are ad networks and what they allow you to do is they're gonna place different banner ads sidebar ads inline ads on your website and when people see these ads and click on them that's a fair chunk of passive ad revenue and clicks that you'll get on these ads allowing you to earn a little bit of extra income on your site sounds awesome right another way to monetize your affiliate website or is it well typical marketing theories like paradox of choice and one page one goal all revolve around the thought that when you distract the reader with too many goals on the same page they're gonna get analysis paralysis and not make any decision so it's better or the theory is it's better on an affiliate website just get them focused on clicking affiliate links rather than having ads all over the place email opt-ins all this different stuff going on the same time and then they don't do anything it's the same concept which works behind why in and out is so popular with their very very brief 5 item menu it's just limited the choice and it makes it really easy for the reader or the the menu order or at in-and-out to decide what they want to get other concerns with display ads is they're typically notorious for speeding up the load time on websites and we all know that speed is very important in this mobile first era so I decided to test it I took 37 pages from an affiliate website that I currently am running it's doing really well in the SERPs and what I did is I located 37 informational topic pieces on the website and I was going to experiment by adding ads on them now these informational topic pieces didn't have any affiliate links on them all they were trying to do for the reader was collect an email address through a lead magnet so it was a no-lose situation even if the ads that I put on the site did take away from the email opt-ins big deal it's not an affiliate Commission it's just an email opt-in test concluded whatever but anyways I decided to test it out anyways and here's what I found here's the four metrics that I took a look at in order to decide whether this is a successful test or not first speed performance it was my website actually impacted by adding these ads on there next I would look at the time on the page because putting these ads up there did cause people to leave or bounce sooner or where the getting turned off for the page that might throw off my user metrics and then maybe upset Google eventually and then of course I was looking at the key metric to see how much were my email opt-in rates affected by this because we can assume that if my email opt-in rates suffered then affiliate content links would suffer too as well and then lastly of course how much more money did I make how much more ad revenue did I create by adding these these ads to these 37 informational content pieces so next I was at the stage where I needed to choose an ad network now the first two ones I looked at were ad thrive media vine and then eventually I looked at NIEHS oeq now when I talked to all these guys they all had one hard restriction that was a no no no no deal for me so to speak basically they didn't allow me to cherry pick and choose which of the pages I was gonna put my ads on now remember I want to run a test first I don't want to just blindly put ads on my entire website possibly increasing my load speed and ruining my affiliate Commission so I needed to cherry thick which brought me to get some other recommendations from some friends and they recommended trying an ad network called new war that's in e wo R so eventually I got an introduction to one of newer senior account managers and the first thing he informed me was about was first I could cherry pick which pages I wanted to put the ads on great I could move forward with the test but they also claimed that adding ads onto the site would not affect speed so I would definitely test this out and if I get to the bottom of this right away so I went with noir and if you're interested in learning more about them I got a join link in the description down below for newer itself here's a basic layout of how our pages looked before the ads were added you can see that we typically have a layout like this where there's email opt-in links in the body of the article and one in the sidebar we added the ads based on the recommendations from the newer managers so they look like this bear in mind this model is out of scale it doesn't actually look like a ton of ads and opt-ins with little content we just make sure there's never more than one of these elements on the same page now for the results first let's talk about speed over the 37 different pages speed add a negative 2% impact on the speed meaning an average of 2 percent slower load time on the websites so I kind of brush this off as being a don't care situation if my websites loading at 1 second then 1.02 is not a big deal okay let's move on time on page was actually negatively hit though so when we averaged this out over the 37 pages we found that it had a negative 19% impact on the amount of time people were staying on the pages so people weren't spending as much time on my content which kind of makes sense if we have more exits on the page that's more potential places for people to leave my content so it got me a little bit worried but I dug a little bit further and I found you know what actually my bounce rate wasn't changed at all so most of the time people were getting to the content they were looking at the website maybe they're clicking on the email opt-ins maybe they were clicking on new content or maybe they're clicking on the ads but they weren't necessarily there wasn't it necessarily increase in bounce rate of people looking at the content to saying too many ads let's get out of here so they weren't bouncing they weren't pogey sticking so I had nothing to worry about it wasn't like people weren't getting their proper answer they were getting their answer and that was signified by them continuing on through a link throughout the rest of the site or another page now the super creative result that I didn't expect at all is that the email opt-in rate increased 29% so the amount of emails opt-ins that I would get on a per daily basis actually increased 29% how didn't make sense to me at all but the theory I had behind it is that ads are so prominent and most of the big publications on the Internet all the big newspapers have them every single large website WebMD all these big large websites have ads on them so it could be some kind of trust indicator to people seeing these ads and just seeing like okay this is a normal thing I'm in a normal website and they actually gave up their email address it's easier so I don't know if this theory is true but hey I'll take it and lastly the fun one ad revenue how much more money did I make for the website because of at installing these ads on these informational content pieces well we eventually moved up to about twenty and twenty to twenty three dollars a day formatting these these ads on these pieces but then eventually the algorithm kind of figured things out we have eventually settled it about forty dollars a day which is about $1,200 a month pretty easy now the question you might be having is should I now put display ads all over the website not just my informational content pieces but also the affiliate content as well well based on my tests my email opt-ins were not affected at all by it so by that same logic my affiliate links shouldn't be have a reduction in clicks at all in fact it could increase so I say go for it so if you'd like to see the full case then you go ahead and click the link below and it'll give you a link to the full blog post where you get all the data and all the conclusions from these tests also if you're interested in joining with newer go ahead and click the other link below where you get access to the network that had zero impact on my site speed good luck [Music]