Optimizing Web Sites -- Not Just For Brand Image, but For Revenue

How-To

Optimizing Web Sites -- Not Just For Brand Image, but For Revenue

by Matthew Conlin, 1 hour ago

Online advertising continues to grow despite the downturn. It's flexible, cost effective and every consumer -- in every demographic -- has interaction with the web at some stage. With Web sites getting millions of hits every day, there is a tremendous opportunity for their owners to take under-performing or under-utilized inventory and turn it into bottom line dollars.

Companies with Web sites are able to boost their revenues by monetizing the traffic that passes through their pages on a daily basis. A Revenue Path can be the ideal tool for an organization to adopt in order to make the most of the revenue generating opportunities that they have at their fingertips.

Implementing any kind of sales or advertising campaign on a Web site can be as simple as taking a banner and planting at the top of the page. However, if you want to optimize the revenue through the site and increase eCPM (revenue per 1000 impressions), the selection, design and placement of campaigns has to be more considered.

Every ad a Web site carries should be specific for their individual pages. This is a mutually beneficial arrangement, but with more up-side for the Web publisher.

Matching the campaign to the traffic
Selecting the right campaign requires two things: firstly, you must have an understanding of who the visitors to the site are. If you have had customers signing up for membership of the site, this information is accessible and can be used in many ways -- not simply from registry of interest in different subjects, but also demographic information submitted.

The second thing is a wide variety of different campaigns available to chose from. If you are working with a Lead Generation company that doesn't carry many offers, or only specializes in one or two areas that aren't relevant to you, it's more difficult to find campaigns that will appeal to your visitors. Working with an Online Ad Company that covers hundreds of different advertisers and campaigns is very important.

Design and place the campaign
Once the campaign is selected, it is important that it is deployed in the right way.
Every campaign that's placed on a site should be designed to look and feel like it belongs there. This can either be done through the bespoke design of every campaign for every site that takes it, or through the design of a highly flexible template, which can be tailored in terms of size, color, font and any other variables to fit any specification.

This effort to integrate the offer into the site will strengthen the association between a customer and the brand being advertised, as well as the website itself.  

Collecting revenue
There are different ways to collect revenue through the inventory and traffic on your website. One example is through a Revenue Path, a tool for Proactive Online Lead Generation. The online campaigns are designed to promote a specific product or service and can collect a variety of customer data -- name, age, telephone number, email address and any other additional data points if needed. This makes the lead far more valuable and therefore lucrative for the Web publisher that collects it.

If you measure the monetization of Web traffic by eCPM, the Revenue Path can deliver higher results than almost any other alternative. Some sites can achieve an eCPM of up to and over $1000.

There are alternatives to this approach. Affiliate Marketing for example. But most of these are inflexible in how they can be deployed -- which often gives your site the appearance of an overly corporate, advertising-driven page. Customers are known to dislike this appearance. In addition, the eCPM for click-through advertising is far lower.

Website publishers can add a significant revenue stream to their business through approaches like the Clash-Media Revenue Path -- importantly, they can do this without affecting the user-experience of their site.