Ad Type That Lowers Your Revenue

2018.04.27

MageNet Team

(13 votes, average: 4.69 out of 5)

Anchor ads seem to be just the right solution for boosting your income from ads placement with their high CPC and CPM rates. But are they really that effective? Let’s find out.

First of all, we’ll define anchor ads and see some examples. Other names for this type of ads include sticky or floating. These are the banners that constantly stay active on the page, and “stick” at some side, usually at the bottom of it.

When a user scrolls the page, the ad stays visible, which supposedly should increase the visibility of the ad itself and the brand it advertises.

Our findings, however, show that it’s often the other way around. Not only publishers’ revenue doesn’t go up, but some of them experience higher bounce rate. Still, we’d better start with the advantages that make publishers consider putting anchor ads on their websites.

Anchor ads’ benefits

High CPC and CPM. Many publishers get seduced by the income boost that seems to come with the anchor ad implementation. It’s true, such ads do have more attractive rates for clicks and impressions.
Better visibility. When the ad is there all the time, obviously, users see it all the time, even during scrolling.
Simple set up. You don’t need hours of work to figure out how to install an anchor ad, as you can use a rather straightforward code to place it on your site.

Anchor ads’ drawbacks

To understand why anchor ads are not as efficient as they are supposed to be you only need to see the results publishers are getting with them.

As we said before, anchor ads have more attractive rates which may convince a publisher to choose them over any other ads available for website monetization. Indeed, site owners who’ve set up anchor ads notice up to 500% increase in their income soon after the ads’ launch. But after some time the results become much less striking. Two or three weeks later the earnings show only 20-30% boost for CPC, and CPMs came back just to the level they had shown before the page level ads.

“Well, 20-30% increase is still something”, you say. But at the end of the day anchor ads bring more income loss than gains to publishers. When comparing total earnings of website owners who showed anchor ads and those who didn’t we see a striking 30% difference. Yes, publishers choosing not to place anchor ads on their sites earn 30% more, even though the rates are higher for page level types of ads.

One of the reasons for that can be a poorer user experience which makes users leave the sites with anchor ads much quicker. The experiments with ads and no-ads groups confirm that – bounce rate for the first group is 8% higher.

As you can see, in the case of anchor ads 10-30% higher prices don’t necessarily mean 10-30% earnings increase after all.

What should you do about anchor ads?

If you feel like placing them on your site, pay a special attention to your income fluctuations. This way you’ll be able to notice any negative side effects like the above-mentioned bounce rate. What’s more, think through the overall customer journey on your website. If you don’t need your users to go further than one page, anchor ad may be a good choice. If you, however, want them to keep walking around your site’s pages, then the anchor ads may cause the bounce rate you’d really want to avoid.

All in all, we suggest using safer methods for your site’s monetization. This could be any other display ad that doesn’t affect user experience.

Some effective yet less annoying ads

You can think about placing native ads on your site. They are much harder for users to identify, because they look “native” to the usual content of your site, imitating its design. This is one of the user-friendliest ways to monetize which will provide you with good click-through and engagement rates (10%+ and 14%+ respectively). But it will require more work from you, as you’ll need to adapt the content of your site, as well as to spend some time looking for worthy opportunities from advertisers.

When it comes to handiness, contextual ads placed with MageNet are much easier to deal with. You as a publisher have nothing to worry about except your site’s quality and attractiveness for advertisers. The ads inserted into your content look very natural and don’t distract readers. Clicks or views don’t worry you anymore, as you get paid per placement.

Then, there’s also MageNet Referral Program with its ready-to-use creatives you can place on your site or share over the Internet. Its terms are developed for your continuous passive earnings, as you as a referrer get your commission for as long as your referrals earn with MageNet. You can read more about ways to succeed with the Program here, and give it a try to ensure income flow from your site.

As you can see, you don’t need to annoy your users with page level ads to make money from your site. Respect your visitors, and use more subtle monetization methods that will bring you profit much longer.