A: You have several options for generating ad revenue by placing ad banners on your site. The option that comes to mind first for most site owners is to contract with an agency that places ads on publishers'' sites (and in this context, you''re the publisher). You are paid based on the number of impressions, by the click-through rate, by the sale as a result of click-through, or through some combination of these. (To see some examples of advertising rates, check out Ad Resource''s Ad Rate Guide.)
Impressions
Impressions are the number of times an ad is served up to be seen by a site visitor. It used to be that ads were sold by impressions. Those days are gone. With click-through rates (clicks per impressions) at between .4% and 2%, most advertisers don''t want to pay for "face time."
Click-throughs
Click-throughs are the number of times a visitor clicks on the banner. Most ad banner networks pay for click-throughs, but they have a lot of restrictions, because they want to know that the clicks might turn into sales.
Sales
If you''re only compensated based on sales, then it''s really an affiliate type of incentive program. This is generally best for the advertisers, but not necessarily best for you, the publisher, because if the ad agency only sends you ads for products that don''t appeal to your visitors, then you''ll have a poor closure rate, regardless of how many eyeballs see the ads.
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Most of the ad placement agencies are going to have some criteria your site is going to have to meet. Some of the more common criteria include:
- At least 100,000 visitors per month,
- Content that excludes porn, hate speech, and anything too controversial,
- There are no incentive programs in place for your visitors that would change their behavior (such as rewarding them for clicking).
They''re also going to want to make sure your site is professionally designed and that you''re not serving up 10 different ads (either banner ads or affiliate ads) on one page, which would really detract from the banner they''re going to serve on your page.
Technically, there''s very little to do on your end to include an ad banner on your page from a banner network. Usually, the agency will just give you a bit of HTML code to include on your page where you want the banner to appear. The code will "pull" the ad image off the ad agency''s server, so you won''t have to worry about ever getting or changing the image or swapping out the image. There will probably be a rotation of images, but again, that''s not something you won''t need to worry about. The code you put on your page will always serve fresh ads from their site (barring network problems) and, in theory, you''ll never need to touch it again.
Little Guys: If your site is small, then you''re probably not going to be able to take advantage of this type of advertising arrangement. You should look into Affiliate Programs (Affiliate Programs: Making Sites Earn Their Up-Keep -- March 23, 1999). If what you really want to do is trade some real estate on your site for some real estate on someone else''s site, to raise your visibility and increase your traffic, consider joining a Banner Exchange (E-Tailing Strategies: Standing Out in the Crowd -- June 18, 1999).
Hacker alert: As a hacker myself, I had to ask the folks at the ad agencies how they prevent publishers from "cooking the numbers" by sending spiders to their own sites to increase both the traffic and the click-throughs. They toldme that they monitor both the IP addresses of user agents (browsers and spiders) to look for these kinds of things. They also told me that the banner ads set cookies on the browsers'' computers, so that they can monitor suspicious behavior. They do watch for sites that have higher than 4% click-through rates, because that''s so far above industry standard. Finally, they said that they will drop sites with high click-through rates and low closure rates, since that doesn''t serve their advertisers.
Resources:
Teknosurf (www.teknosurf.com) reviews sites for content before placing ads. More emphasis on content and potential traffic than on current traffic. Pay per clickthrough.
AdClub (www.adclub.com) fast turn-around of applications. Minimum of 500K impressions per month. Pay per clickthrough.
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