Five considerations when designing your website for advertising
Putting together a site that is designed to include ads is not particularly difficult, but if you get the layout wrong, it can cost you in ad revenue and in site traffic. The ads may end up in positions where they are not entirely visible, or you may be displaying them in a way that does not show them fully or somehow blocks the main body of your site. The risk of annoying your audience and discourage your advertisers is high. Listed below are some thing you need to consider when designing a website for advertising.
Considerations for desktop
Websites designed to be shown on desktop, laptop and full size computers are perhaps the most powerful when it comes to advertising, simply because you have a whole lot more space to work with. Since any page can scroll down, you have almost unlimited space to include all sorts of different advertising, including text links in the body of your content. Top, middle and bottom leaderboard as well as left and right sidebar are all popular ad placements. Full size computers are also more powerful and faster in loading and rendering the pages, even with ads. While space is your friend on a full size desktop or laptop, you still need to think about where to place the ads because they need to look as a natural part of the overall design. Don’t put too many ads that put off your audience and also depress ad pricing.
Considerations for mobile
Size becomes a serious issue when you are designing a mobile website with advertising. It goes without saying that large skyscraper ads are not going to look particularly good on the smaller screens and most likely you don’t have a sidebar for advertising. You also need to remember that site loading speed is often slower on a mobile device. Thus, ads that are complex, flashy, or which contain a lot of interactions or components may drag down the performance of the site and increase the visitor’s bounce rate. Small and simple is the way to go here.
Responsive design
Running a single website can take a lot of work, but if you have two separate sites – one for desktop and one for mobile – to maintain, you might find that much of your time is taken up with tweaking the design and adding content. You can make things that much easier with a modern responsive design website, which is one which automatically adjusts to the resolution of the screen it is being viewed on. The same sidebar might show only on desktop and is completely invisible on mobile. However, having a single website that works on all screens is more complicated because the design should be responsive on both factors: screen resolution and loading speed. Careful planning and testing is a must.
Speed
How quickly a website loads is very important, as visitors with slower connections may lose interest and click away from your pages if your site is taking too long to load. Big, flashy ads can become a burden on site performance. They might block your other content and also other ads from loading in a timely manner. While they may look great, they may only end up being seen by the fraction of your audience with powerful device and blazing speed Internet. You want your
ad serving and site loading is fast and instantaneous for your viewers.
Ad format and user activities
It’s important to pay attention to your website data as it pertains to what your visitors do while they’re there. Different sections might need different ad formats. If visitors spend a long time on a particular section, you should avoid pop-up ads or auto-play videos, as these may serve as a distraction from the content. They may be better served with text ads. Flashy, interstitial or page take-over ads may be more suitable on special pages if visitors only stay for a short period of time. Thus, be sure to look at the viewing habits of your users, the page sections and categorize the ad placements accordingly.
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