Using A Top Stripe Ad To Get Visitors
March 26th, 2008 1 CommentsI’ve wrote before about how I tried using a top stripe ad on this blog and why I removed it. It came down to people not liking it and the fact that the click-through-rate which it attracted was very poor. After a couple of weeks I removed it never for it to return. However, the majority of the visitors here are fellow bloggers and webmasters and so are very hard to please. I know from experience that just because something doesn’t work on a blog doesn’t mean that that it won’t work on a more general interest content website. Another experiment was born!
The first problem was that the top stripe ad I was using is in fact a WordPress plug-in and I wanted to use it on static web pages. In order to mirror the affect I had to get my fingers a bit dirty and pull the CSS and HTML so that I could add it to any pages that I chose. Of course one major difference from the WordPress plug-in would be that my ad would now only be showing on a single page. Just in case anybody wants to do something similar here is the CSS and HTML I used to get my ad showing at the top of the page.
CSS-
#top_bar {
background: #FFFFE1;
border-bottom: 1px solid #808080;
margin: 0 0 3px 0;
padding: 4px 0;
z-index: 100;
top: 0;
left: 0;
width: 100%;
overflow: auto;
}
* html #top_bar{
position: absolute;
width: expression(document.compatMode=="CSS1Compat"? document.documentElement.clientWidth+"px" : body.clientWidth+"px");
}
HTML-
<-div id="top_bar">
<-p align="center">Your Text Here<-/p><- /div>
I wasn’t expecting much and to be fair I wasn’t disappointed, although CTR was quite high compared to my blogs, conversions were low. The big bonus was that I didn’t see any complaints about it, even on sites where I encourage feed back nobody seemed too bothered by that ad. A little extra money and no complaints, not a massive success but good enough.
The SERPs 1 Week Later
Jump forward one week later and I’m checking site stats in Google Analytics. Something strange is happening, a couple of websites have seen a 10-15% “jump” in visitors. Looking at more detail I can see that it’s individual pages that are in fact making the jump (mainly in Yahoo and MSN). No prizes for guessing what pages! The pages with the top ad have seen significant increases in the SERPs resulting in more traffic. As a test I remove the ad from 2 pages and sure enough the pages slowly slip. How is this possible?
I think it all comes down to on-the-page factors. You see by making that top ad completely relevant to only one page and one page only I’ve added more relevant content. Even more importantly by placing that relevant content right at the top of the source document i’m letting the search engines know how important it is. One of the great advantages of using CSS for positioning over a table layout is that it allows you to get your most important content to the very top of your source document. I wasn’t even thinking about this when I put those ads up but it really has worked. The key facts to remember here are:-
1. One ad per page and make sure it’s relevant and optimised for your other content on that page
2. Place the ad code as high up your HTML body content as possible, preferably straight after the body tag
With a properly designed custom xHTML/CSS website it should be possible to have all your most important text content as high up your page source as you want. Personally I have a few websites that still rely on tables for their layout but having seen the affect even this small example can have on rankings one of my jobs is now to go back over those and convert to CSS.
and was contributing to quite a few forums. Instead of ranting long and hard on other people’s websites why not have her own? And so the