Affiliate Programs — How to Effectively Place Affiliate Content on your Site
Almost every site you encounter these days will have some kind of adevertising or other on it (just as this one does). We all know that only one visitor in a hundred will actually click on the links supplied so we plaster our sites with more colourful or dynamic ads in the hope that the number of clicks (the so-called 'click-through' rate) will increase. In this respect I was blindly following the herd. Creating content, adding more pages to the site, attempting to get my page rank in Google increased whilst using other methods such as blogs, rss and web forums to drive traffic to my site. In effect I was relying on increased traffic to overcome the perceived limitation of the 1% click-through rate. Then I began doing some research about what's known as human–computer interaction (HCI). Basically the psychology behind how the people interact with web pages. What makes them pay attention to elements on a page and what the things they ignore. A number of the things I found out have bee applied to my website (and have doubled revenue without increasing the number of pages or drawing more traffic and on this page I'm going to share what I found out with you.
How Surfers Actually View Web Pages
This could be considred as the crux of what we're trying to understand. After all, how many web designers or web authors have actually thought seriously about how users actually view their web pages. We're all so focussed on content that we can often entirely ignore our intended audience. Perhaps this is because we have a sneaky suspicion that we won't like the answer. In many ways such unconscious fears aren't unfounded as the studies undertaken in this area so far really don't make encouraging reading. However, if we don't know what people are actually doing when they're reading information on a website then we can't make our sites better to cater for how people actually do read them.
The first thing to recognise is the nature of the web itself. It is generally information rich but content poor. Most web surfers are internet savvy. They know that they may well have to visit several websites to glean the information they're looking for. As a result they tend not to examine a particular website in detail. Rather they 'graze' a particular site looking for specific keywords so that the particular information they're looking for can be sought-out.
Helping the User find What they Want
It'sone of the paradoxes of the internet that you want to keep the user on your site as long as possible whilst the user simply wants to get at the nub of the information you're providing so that they can move on to the next site. This develops into a tug-of-war between the web designer and the user which may lead to the user becoming so fed-up with your site that they never visit it again. It may sound counter-intuitive but actually helping the user find what they want so that they can leave quickly may actually significantly improve return traffic to your site. If you arrange each web page with easy sub-titles and an obvious key to the main sections whlst providing easily navigable sitemaps and site search systems will make them feel comfortable on your site.
Human beings are basically the same as they were a thousand, two thousand, five thousand years ago. We are have all evolved to deal with other people on a personal level. We need to know other people so that we can grow to trust them. Providing easy and consistent navigation on your site helps this aspect of 'trust'. So that people believe you are trying to help them rather than trying to help yourself. Your site will, as a result, become an information resource that they will come back to again and again. This interaction with your visitor, gaining their trust and giving them reasons to come back to your site, is ar more important than trying to trap them into your site on a single visit. This is why you sould develop your own 'voice' on your site. Make it individual, use your own writing style so that your visitors know you and konw you can be trusted. This way they will come to trust other aspects of your site, such as the advertising you're providing.
The Phenomenon of 'Banner Blindness'
Even today the most common medium for advertising on the Web is through the use of banner advertisements. This form of advertisement often combines animation, sophisticated graphics, and even audio to endorse product information. The effectiveness of such advertising being generally measured in terms of the 'click through rate' which is the ratio of the number of times an ad appears on a page compared to the number of times an individual clicks on the banner. The problem is that banner ads are great for the retailer but poor for the website owner. Recent research has shown that an internet banner is efffectively equivalent to a 30-second TV advertisement in increasing overall user awareness of a brand by as much as 40%. So, 2/5 of your visitors will remember a brand from a banner advertisement after they leave your site but only 1 in every 100 will actually click on the banner. Effectively, in the hope of gaining that 1% click-throug you're actually proving the various companies you're affilated with a lot of free advertising. Indeed, dollar for dollar the internet is by far the most cost-effective means of advertising for any company. But if you look at the figures it's not actually very good for you as a webmaster/web-designer.
Don't get disheartened, though, because banners can work it's just that research demonstrates that extremely colorful and obvious banners tend to be ignored by users. When participants in this study were asked to find specific information on a web page, the information was not found if it was imbedded in a banner. Indeed, it is as a result of this study that the term 'banner blindness' was coined. This study also discovered that banners located at the top of the page (away from other links), tended to be ignored more often than banners located lower down the page (closer to other important links). This finding has been confirmed by other studies which demonstrated a 77% increased click-through rate for advertisements placed 1/3 of the way down the page.
How we View Web Pages
Our colour perception and our front-facing eyes giving us binocular vision are all part of our primate heritage; the genetic link we share with Gorillas and Chimpanzees. We evolved in colourful rainforests and colour vision is part of the background to our lives. The problem is that our vision is keyed to movement. This is why static colourful banners can be ignored easily, as they fade into the background of our visual surfing experience. This may explain why animated ads generally have a 15% higher click-through rate than static ads and in some cases may have as much as a 40% higher rate. This is because motion against a colourful background speaks to the primate brain of danger; something we have to investigate to make sure it's not a threat.
It should also be noted that the development of reading and writing is a very recent phenomenon in humans. As a result reading and writing doesn't come naturally to us (in the way that learning our first language does); it's a learnt skill that's an effort to maintan (compare your attitude to spelling mistakes compared iwth mispronunciations if you don't believe me). Reading is an effort and we have to concentrate to do it. This is why recent investigations examining where an user's eyes track on a web page show that about 92% of the time is used-up in examining texutal data. This finding has considerable implications as to what kinds of advertisement work on the web and where such advertisements should be placed.
Effective Selling with Text Advertisements
By looking at other websites you may have observed a recent trend for the placing of advertisements such as Google Adsense ads and affiliate ads within the text of a website. The trend being to use text-based advertisements with the same colour scheme and fonts as used in the main body of the text. This way the reader of the web page actually reads the text of the advertisement (or at least scans it) in the same way that they scan the remainder of the text. This has proved very effective, and in using it on my own site I have seen an almost 8-fold increase in click-through revenue (yes, that's right 800%).
You should also note that humans like things divided into thirds. Artists and photographers have known this 'rule of thirds' for several centuries. Indeed, if taking your own snaps, if you place a person in a landscape the most pleasing way to do this is to have that person's head located a third of the way down from the top and a third of the way from the left or right hand sides of the image. Even if you're taking a purely landscape image you can make it more dramatic by placing a focal point somewhere within one of these thirds of the image. This is probably why advertisements palced somewhere within these thirds grids of a website are more effective than banners located elsewhere.
Banner Advertising, Should your Bother?
Recent studies have compared ads with few words against a white background (where there's a marked contrast between the text and the background) against an ad where there are more colours and the text is nearer in contrast to the background. The highly-contrasty advertisements proved far more effective that the 'busy' high-contrast advertising. This may well because the high-contrast advertisement looks much more like plain text and is read as such.
Effective banners can therefore work but you will have to pay more careful attention to the placement of these banners. Simply placing banners across the top of your page will not work. They are probably going to be more effective inset somewhere into the text. Also, the banners you're serving will need to be relevant to the various visitors to your site. In effect all the visitors are coming to your site to search for specific information and if you give them relevant content and advertisements that specifically target that content your click-through rates will increase. So, if you're selecting banners for your website take grate care over the banner's format and its placement on your website.
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Conclusion
In conclusion, knowning something about human evolution and human psychology can lead us to make more effective use of advertisements on our sites. Placement can be predicted using the rules of what humans find pleasant in an image and text built naturally into a web page can be far more effective than either banners or left and right navigation at attracting clicks. There is also site design itself. Make your web pages useful and easily navigable and you will find that far more poeple visit your pages more often. In the end, however, the adage 'Content is King' remains a truism. No-one will visit your website if it doesn't have something new to say or doesn't provide a new slant on the sum of human knowlege. To paraphrase John Donne: no website is an island and this is the central adage on the internet. After all it's a web of content and your site should link out to other sites as well as linking internally to itself.
The only real answer is to diversify. Serve both banner advertisement and adsense advertisements on the same page. Go for the banner advertisements with animation and with high contrast. Place them in your text if you can. Certainly palce the adsense advertisements in your text and make them look as similar to the overall 'look and feel' of your site as you can. This way you too can significantly improve your monthly income.
Thanks to Nemeton Information for making this information available.