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3 Ways Publishers Can Optimize for Conversions

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Conversion rate optimization is the best way to increase revenues without increasing the amount of money being spent on advertisements. Here are three ways that publishers can increase conversions.

 
Define Your Conversion Goals
 
For the majority of publishers, the single goal is to get a click from a visitor. However, you should instead be focusing on how much revenue can be generated over a lifetime by that visitor. This is much more difficult than simply tracking CTR numbers but is worthwhile. You should define your goals instead in terms of tracking visitor engagement on your content pages, increasing the distribution of your content so that it is shared more often on social media sites and finally by optimizing your pages so that visitors click on ads on your content with greater frequency.
 
Change Up Your Ad Placements
 
It has been well proven that sidebar ads generate very poor click through ratios. In addition, the traditional locations such as the header also do not work because your readers have significant blindness these days to these ad positions. Instead you should change things by doing a mix of display advertising and contextual advertising. This allows the advertising to appear more natural and will make your readers more likely to click on the ads.
 
Make It Easier for Visitors to Engage With Your Content
 
By making it difficult for readers to engage with your content, you are effectively losing traffic. Instead of making readers search for related content, you should make sure that readers can easily find related posts that they want to read. In addition, don’t make visitors create an account to perform simple actions such as leaving comments on your site. Visitors should only be asked to create an account on your site if there are significant benefits associated with a site. By putting your entire site behind a wall that is for account holders only, you will make your visitors simply look elsewhere for the user experience and content that they want.
 
Improving your conversions can be done if you are willing to make some fundamental changes in your approach. Most of what you have likely learned in the past about how to set up a campaign is now outdated due to the fact that visitors are increasingly more intelligent about advertising. By implementing these simple tips, you should see some improvements in your conversion rates.
 
This article was originally published by The Mail
Published: June 30, 2014
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Murray Newlands

Murray founded The Mail in 2013, an angel-funded start up publication covering performance marketing and mobile marketing. Murray is also editor of www.moneymakerdiscussion.com and is best known for his video reporting. Murray is an advisor to a number of Bay Area startups. In 2011 Wiley published his book Online Marketing: A User's Manual. Born in England, Murray moved to the USA in 2011, being recognized by the US government as an alien of extraordinary ability.

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