How Does Word Count Affect Website Ad Earnings?
How Does Word Count Affect Website Ad Earnings?
Why does article length affect website revenue?
1. More [_engaged time_](https://blog.ezoic.com/engagement-time-important-top-publishers/) results in higher ad rates for your site
2. Longer sessions and more pageviews result in higher session earnings ([or EPMV](https://blog.ezoic.com/why-ecpm-vs-rpm-is-skewing-true-earnings/))
What website word counts earn the highest average revenues?
> For example, Page A may earn more than Page B, but if you learn that visitors landing on Page B visit three times as many additional pages as visitors landing on Page A, you might learn that Page B actually is that starting point for visitors earning three times as much revenue.
To that point, understanding page RPM can still be really useful for understanding the relationship between revenue, pages, and word counts.
Case Study #1: Technology website
This first example is a technology website. Its content is catered towards internet searchers that are seeking to better understand how to use a popular brand of technology and it’s products.
Page RPM by Word Count
You can see here that, despite what conventional wisdom might have you believe, that on this website there seems to be a sweet spot for total page revenue.
Page word counts between 1000-2500 generate the highest revenues for this publisher.
Surprisingly, the pages with between 2500-500o words (the longest articles) actually generate less revenue for this publisher than their pages with 750-1000 words (some of their shorter articles).
Engaged Pageviews by Word Count
When we take a deeper look at why this might be occurring, we learn that [engaged pageviews](https://blog.ezoic.com/monitoring-engaged-pageviews-per-visit-offers-major-benefits/) are MUCH HIGHER on the articles with 1000-2500. This is consistent with the research we shared earlier.
This means that this publisher should be taking a much closer look at how their engaged pageviews and revenue correlate by understanding why those particular articles connect so well with their audience.
> They may want to modify existing content to replicate some of the success those articles have, or create more content like this high-earning, highly-engaging content.
Case Study #2: Sports website
This case is a sports website. Its content is catered towards fans and people interested in a popular sports franchise.
Page RPM by Word Count
In this example, we see a similar trend from the site we saw before. However, in this case, we can see that the articles with 1000-2500 words receive an RPM that is 3x as high as articles with 500 words or fewer.
As a publisher, you may look at this and say, “one article with 1000-2500 words is worth more than 3 articles with 500 words or fewer”.
Total Page Engagement by Word Count
What’s interesting on this site is that total page engagement is actually similar for all articles with more than 750 words.
Where you see a marriage between engagement and revenue is when you actually look at bounce rate by word count on this site.
Bounce Rate by Word Count
This provides a nice picture of why the RPM is higher on pages with between 1000-2500 words. These articles maximize engagement and minimize bounce on this site.
Case Study #3: Recipe blog
This case includes a popular recipe blog. Its content is built for a large audience of searchers and visitors referred from social media websites.
Page RPM by Word Count
Here, we see that this popular blog actually produces a similar page RPM across all articles more than about 250 words. In fact, the articles with 250-500 words outperform the longest articles in terms of RPMs.
Page Duration by Word Count
This all starts to make a little more sense once we understand that average page duration is nearly the same of this site regardless of word count.
This can be understood better by looking at the site itself. Regardless of word count, many of the recipes include simple instructions, images, and other media.
Average Page Scroll Percentages
Regardless of word count, we can see that this site has a loyal audience that scrolls to the bottom of the page nearly 33% of the time no matter what length the article is.
This info can help fill in some of the gaps about visitor behavior we were missing.
This site obviously has a lot of loyal visitors that find the content valuable and the word count is not as big of a factor due to the nature of the content. Readers will consume the whole thing 1/3 of the time no matter what.
Case Study #4: Tool/Application website
In many cases, webmasters that manage non-traditional websites, like an online application, tool, or gaming website will assume word counts don’t really apply to their content.
What we see in this final study — of an application website — is that this isn’t necessarily true.
Page RPM by Word Count
You can see that their highest page RPM is on their site’s application pages; which are obviously very thin on actual words (less than 250). However, the pages with 5,000+ words actually generate almost exactly the same amount.
Furthermore, we see that there is a direct correlation between ascending word counts and page RPMs with this publisher.
This might be a surprise to a publisher that believed that word counts played no role in how they monetized their content or interacted with visitors.
Does word count affect website page RPM?
How do you use word count data on your website moving forward?
I think it’s pretty simple.
If you have this info, you can figure out how to make your existing content more engaging and valuable. Do this by augmenting it based on what you can learn from your pages with top performing word counts.
If you find that the shorter articles are doing better, it may be because your longer articles are actually LESS engaging. You may want to find ways to chop up the content or make it more consumable for your readers.
Lastly, you can use this info when generating new content.
If you have further thoughts on this data, or questions for me regarding the case studies, share them in the comments.