Sports news and sports teams are one of the most popular searches on Google, which means a great opportunity for publishers from that niche to make more money. If you do not want to spend thousands of dollars for AdOps specialists to maximize your revenue, you are in a right place.
Here is all you need to know on how to monetize your sports website.
If you already have an account with ad platforms like Google Adsense and Google Ad Exchange it is essential that you know where to strategically place your ads.
It usually varies per device – is it desktop or mobile. For mobile, if your article has a short excerpt before the main content, it is best to place the top ads below this line. In this way, when the article loads, the whole ad is visible to the user and it will not push the content below the fold.
For the rest of the content ads, it’s crucial that 1 ad per viewport will be followed.
It is a quality not the quantity (secret to monetize a sports site)
Having fewer ads on an article page usually works better in monetization than having about 3-5 ads on the page, including the anchor and interstitial ads. Why is that?
Lower part of the article has lesser viewability of the ads. Some users do not even finish reading the entire article and would veer away to another page before the ads can load. This instance, among others, can affect the viewability of the entire site.
Improve Viewability
In continuation to the topic above, having good viewability yields better Ad eCPM. As observed, when viewability is good, CTR and Ad eCPM will also improve.
Viewability is one of the metrics that advertisers look into in a site. Having good stats on this metric would encourage more advertisers to pay for the ad units on your site and have their ads shown.
How do we do that? Here are some points.
You can identify the ad units that are low-performing in terms of viewability. Commonly, these are the ad units found at the bottom of an article page.
If they are below 50% you may consider removing them from the page. If you are using WordPress, you may consider installing a preloader plug-in.
This allows the site a few seconds delay to give time for the ads and the entire content to load.
However, do take note when setting the time of delay as it may affect the bounce rate.
Set up Unified Pricing Rules (UPR)
Setting up the pricing rule allows you to set pricing for your ad units depending on how they are performing.
This can be done in two ways – via target CPM or hard floor.
Since UPR is pretty much wide and dynamic, there are different approaches to how you can set up the rules.
Depending on the traffic, you may want to set pricing floors depending on the Traffic Geo. For diversified traffic identifying the top-performing Geo’s and setting up a price floor for each would be a good approach.
Separating pricing rules for each device – desktop and mobile is another good way to set up the rules as well. Using the utm_source targeting or performing URLs also works.
Good quality content is the key
Having good content for your sports site is a good start. Interesting content helps in user engagement and in turn, would increase your session.
If you have a Google Analytics account, here are the basic metrics that you may want to check that point to user engagement:
- Pageviews
- Sessions
- Pages per Session
- Bounce Rate
Traffic Quality and Adhesion to Google Policies
Some sites use different platforms to drive traffic to their site. Having a reliable and good quality of traffic is essential.
Using bot traffic on your site is definitely a No-No! This is totally a violation of Google Policy and could lead to the banning of the site.
Once the site gets banned, there will be a chance that it may not be able to have it accredited with Google again.
Whenever ads are being implemented or you drive traffic to your site, you need to make sure that you are adhering to Google’s policy, otherwise, all hard work will go down the drain.
These small details can be overwhelming especially for publishers who have just started. There are ways to make money out of your sports site even for a newbie.
Sign up for a free demo and let Bidscape.it unlock the revenue potential of your website.