Testing different adverts
Many site owners with good traffic try their hand at a little bit of advertising. But, which advert out of the choice of many works best?
Well that is the question I faced. I knew adding another advert to one of my websites would make it too heavy in the advertising front. And the problem is that this week I am trying out 2 different adverts.
Which earns the most?
One is for free business cards and the other for free PPC Advertising. Which would generate the best revenue?
There are two ways of testing this. Put one advert up, leave it running and then swap it over. But, how do you know that the trial is equal before deciding which earned the best income? That way is no good.
Random display testing
So my preferred method is random displaying. This should work very well as many people do read multiple page on that blog, so could get to see both adverts! How do you code it?
Well very simply in PHP, using this code:
<?php
$addswitch = rand(1, 2);
if ($addswitch == 1) { ?>
[html for first advert]
<?php } else { ?>
[html for second advert]
<?php } ?>
The vital line of code!
Yes, very basic and might be better with a switch statement, but the important aspect is that rand(1,2) statement. That is asking for a random number between 1 and 2. If you wanted to test more adverts or to weight an advert, that could become rand(1,3) etc.
But using even weighting, over the course of a few thousand page hits all thing should be roughly equal. So in a week I’ll look at both systems and see what income they have made. If neither is doing well then I might just put back the Google Adsense block I had there!
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December 7th, 2010 at 7:27 pm
Good peace of advice, but what to do if most serious adverts don’t allow manipulating this things?
December 9th, 2010 at 12:17 am
Actually, there is no danger of it not being ‘allowed’. You are simply surrounding the advert with code that decides whether or not to display it. In my case I chose between 2 different affiliate links of the same size. But equally well, one option within the block could be Google or whatever. You are not manipulating the advert, just selecting one to display.