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Nicolas Granja
Nicolas Granja

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How I increased by 3x my ads revenue doing a simple change on my site.

I'm going to explaining how I managed to triplicate my revenue from ads with a pretty simple change on my website that I believe most of you can replicate on your own sites.

Disclaimer: what I actually triplicated was the number of pages per session, which directly affected my ads revenue (you get paid for the number of impressions). To make it clearer, with the same number of visitors I triplicated the number of ads impression, and - before you ask - without adding more ads. Let's see how I did it.

Pleasant surprise.

A couple of days ago I shared on the subreddit r/India (post here) my website knowyourworth.app. That drove a lot of traffic to my site, so I decided to take a look at the analytics. I found that I got 9k+ page views that day, but what it caught my attention was the number of Pages per Session: 7.3.

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7.32 pages per session on May 11

Before that day (11th May), that metric was around 2.2, as you can see in the following image.

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2.22 pages per session the week before

Finding the reason.

The thing is, that the main page of my site is a big table where you can compare salaries filtering by location, education, experience, job title, and more.
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Salary comparison page with some filters applied.

Most of my visitors spent most of their time on that page, applying filters and browsing the data using the table pagination.

A lot of people were asking me if I could show the state of the filters in the URL, so they could copy it and share the search very easily.

So that's exactly what I did.
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Filters in the URL

Once it was done, each time someone makes a search, the URL change (without refreshing the page, thanks to VueJs that reuse the component) but it actually counts as a new page, at least for google analytics. Therefore, with the same number of visitors, I get 3 times more page views.

The (not so) magical change.

It is debatable whether it is right to count it or not, but anyway I decided to take advantage of this, refreshing the ad each time the URL changed (I'll keep the technical side of these changes aside, but if someone is interested just ask me), That's it, that's was the small change.

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Ad refreshing each time a filter is applied.

As you can see, it is a non-intrusive way to show more ads to the users but in a nicer way, not just throwing annoying ads all over the page.

I believe this kind of change could be useful for a lot of people that have a website like curated lists, job boards, etc, any page where the people spend a lot of time playing around with filters or something similar.

Well, that's it, thanks for reading, I hope it was useful.

If you have some suggestions or ideas you can reach me out on twitter.

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