Monetize Your Top Exit Pages

Google Analytics does a great job of allowing you to analyze your web traffic through a very important metric: top exit pages. This metric, along with bounce rate and time on site, is valuable as it allows you to measure the impact of changes to your webpages. Did exit rate go up or down? You can choose to optimize pages with high exit rates to try to keep your visitors longer or help them convert, or -- if the page is a logical exit point, you can monetize outgoing traffic on high exit pages by using Google AdSense. (As you may know, Google Analytics and AdSense are integrated, similarly to Analytics and AdWords, so you can optimize your AdSense campaigns using data in Google Analytics.)

If you choose to monetize an exit page, take a look at this short real-world example.

SavetzPublishing.com, on its FreePrintable.net site, provide documents and templates for individuals and businesses, ranging from business forms and certificates, to bookmarks and almost any other document someone would want to print. With sixty-six sites focusing on different niches in printing, Savetz Publishing was looking for a way to optimize their ad placement without having a negative impact on their core users. As a solution, they decided to “find the pages with the highest exit rates and put AdSense on them," according to Kevin Savetz, the owner of Savetz Publishing and FreePrintable.

Kevin has been an Analytics user for as long as he can remember and he had an idea of where the bounce and exit rates would be highest. Kevin used Google Analytics to confirm his theory and placed AdSense ads on some of these pages. He quickly realized that this advertising did not have a significant negative impact on his site’s core users and on conversions. Instead, as he describes, these ads provide “a means of monetizing traffic that would already be leaving. My users are still happy and getting relevant content.”

Savetz Publishing’s strategy highlights how sites can use AdSense to monetize traffic that is already exiting the site. AdSense can help sites like these increase overall revenue without changing their current business model. As Kevin put it, AdSense allowed him to “see a huge jump in revenue after targeting exit pages.”

And taking it one step further...As a Google Analytics user, you understand how visitors interact with your website. With this knowledge and the controls in AdSense, you can even structure your AdSense ads to appeal to advertisers who want to display their ads on your site. In turn, you will earn revenue by displaying more relevant and high quality ads.

Here are a couple suggestions to get started with AdSense on your site.

• Try testing AdSense first on your top exit pages, and then evaluate the effect it has on your relevant traffic, by referring to your top exit pages report.
• If, like Savetz Publishing and FreePrintable, you find that adding relevant ads on your site does not turn your relevant traffic away, increase the coverage of AdSense on your site. You can use the additional revenue you earn from AdSense to help you generate more qualified traffic.

Learn more about AdSense and start by testing on your exit pages.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team and Nathan Deoms, Google AdSense Team