Why Broadband is good for AdSense (probably)

Broadband provides people with an enhanced web browsing experience and many people who’ve got broadband say they don’t know how they did without it.

I haven’t got it yet and I don’t know how I do without it either except to say that dial-up access is slow, wastes a lot of my time and means I can’t navigate around the internet at high speed.

The web browsing experience with broadband is such that you can jump from one web page to another with greater rapidity and so the barrier to clicking comes right down.

Pre-broadband, everyone thought twice about the click: would it take too long to download on a slow modem; would the page be worth visiting when you got there at 28kbps? If you wanted to come back, would that be another wait?

With broadband, this resistance to visiting other sites is coming tumbling down and this is both a challenge for all webmasters and a benefit to AdSense publishers.

The challenge arises because it is even easier for people to move from your site to another fast. This means that your content has to work harder to keep people on board.

But with broadband it is also easy for people to click on an AdSense ad and visit another site that way.  The speed of the connection is such that, if the ad looks interesting, I think it is more likely to get the click: they know they will see the landing page quickly AND they know that they can come back quickly too. (Don’t forget that AdSense ads do not open the advertiser’s page in a new window).

Ads that get more clicks due to broadband’s speed make you more money.

How to test your site with Broadband.

(You’ve got to be keen to do this.)

Theoretically you could test this: you’d need a website in which people opted in to 1 of 2 versions. The first version would be for those with dial-up access and the second version would be for people with broadband / DSL access.

You’d then create two identical sites but with different AdSense channels set up to monitor the click through rates on each one.  You would direct traffic to the appropriate version, broadband or dial-up, using a cookie.

Once you had sufficient data, you’d then check the overall click through rate for the Broadband site against the rate for the dial up site.

I’ll give away a free copy of my book The Definitive Guide to Google AdSense to the first person who can provide me with stats on this.