If you have been a regular reader, you have noticed that my website design has changed a few times lately. I have been trying new things and as much as I can duplicate it in my development environment, it’s just not the same as all my content live with ads.
Yesterday, I settled on the design you should be seeing now and it’s a little departure for me because it’s a canned design from Blogging Pro. I am sure that it will evolve to be more unique over time, but I had found myself in a situation where I wasn’t getting the most value out of my traffic for a variety of reasons.
My readers did not have enough internal jump points. That means that odds are, if someone came to my page via a search engine (80% of my traffic) that they are leaving before they find another compelling piece of content that is mine. Those readers could account for several page views and are only giving me one.
The answer is to try to spread my content around the page in such a way that no matter where you might be on my page, you can see additional content that will not cause you to leave the website. The metric this relates to is page views per user.
Currently my page views per user has dropped to 1.5. That means that each visitor looks at a page and a half. So in the case of having 3 ads and 3 referral units on my page, 1 reader is worth 9 ad impressions.
My friend Hugh’s website Halo Showcase, averages nearly 9 page views per user. With those stats, 1 reader would be worth 54 ad impressions. So with 10,000 readers in one day, a clickthrough rate of 1% and an average of .20 per click, that’s the difference between $180 and $1,080 a day!
So, this template you see is one I decided was very efficient for display of information as well as readability and profitability.
We all know ads are what makes these blogs go, if you are running your own blog, before you go crazy with a super custom, overly graphic design, be sure to look at it’s impact on your traffic.
Tweet
Did you conversion improve with this template? Did the visitors started viewing more pages after you have implemented it? I’m thinking of creating my own custom wordpress theme instead of using existing ones as well.
This theme looks pretty good I tend to customize my own themese a lot though.