Display advertising

Display ads pay you for views and clicks rather than for sales, which means you can earn from the visitors who read your articles and never buy anything. This guide covers when that is worth doing, which network to use, and how to keep ads from eating your affiliate clicks.

Should you run ads at all?

Display ads work best as a secondary income stream. Your affiliate commissions will almost always earn more per visitor, and a visitor who clicks an ad instead of your buy button usually earns you less. Consider ads when:

• Your store gets consistent traffic, at least a few hundred visitors a day.
• You have plenty of content-heavy pages: articles, guides, comparisons.
• You want to monetise the people who are researching rather than buying.

Rates also vary enormously by topic. Advertisers pay well in finance, insurance, legal, health, technology and home improvement, and poorly in entertainment, general lifestyle, and hobbies with low commercial intent. Niches with high commercial intent earn more from ads, and they tend to be the same niches that earn well from commissions.

Start with Google Adsense

Adsense is free, it is open to small stores, and Google places the ads for you based on your content. Google does have an approval process. To improve your chances:

• Have real content. Fifteen to twenty original, useful articles. The Article Writer will get you most of the way there quickly.
• Use a custom domain. Google prefers a store on its own domain to one on a subdomain.
• Have clear navigation. Organised categories and a clean layout.
• Include the essential pages. Privacy Policy, About, and Contact.

Apply at google.com/adsense, then follow the setup guide.

🔗 How to add Google Adsense to your store

Moving up as your traffic grows

Adsense is not the only option, and the alternatives pay considerably more once your traffic qualifies you. Switching network is a settings change, so this ladder costs you nothing but the traffic you were building anyway.

• Ezoic. No traffic minimum. Uses AI to test ad placements automatically and generally beats Adsense. The usual stepping stone.
• Mediavine. From 50,000 sessions a month. Widely treated as the gold standard, often paying two to five times Adsense rates. Selective, and usually requires exclusivity, so you cannot run other networks alongside it.
• Raptive (formerly AdThrive). From 100,000 pageviews a month. Among the highest payouts in the industry, for high traffic stores in premium niches. Something to aim at.
• Amazon Native Shopping Ads. Needs an active Amazon Associates account rather than a traffic threshold. Commission-based, and it blends naturally into a store that is already promoting Amazon products.

Running ads without losing commissions

• Protect your affiliate clicks. Put ads on articles and content pages. Keep product pages focused on the buy button.
• Never place an ad next to a buy button. You are paying a few cents to lose a commission.
• Watch your page speed. Ads add weight. If your store slows down noticeably, cut them back.
• Don't stack them. More ads is not more money past a certain point, and it costs you visitors and rankings.
• Test properly. Run one network for a month, then another, and compare total earnings including commissions, not ad revenue alone.

🔗 Other income streams