AdZert Articles

What Are Ad Networks?

noreply@blogger.com (Henri "PAPA PUA" Duong) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 14:06:00 +0000

The web ad industry has created a number of proven business models that uniquely combine the worlds of traditional advertising and high technology. Chief among these is the advent of web advertising networks-companies that act as brokers to unite web advertisers and web publishers (the buyers and sellers of web advertisements).

These networks acquire and aggregate advertising inventory from web sites (typically each page view, or impression, offers at least one ad placement opportunity) and sell them to online advertisers on their behalf. Web advertising networks such as AdZert simplify the acts of buying and selling for both the advertiser and the web publisher.

Online Advertising Glossary

noreply@blogger.com (Henri "PAPA PUA" Duong) — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 21:38:00 +0000

Discover the meaning of the the abbreviations used in internet advertising such as CPM, CPC, ROI among others.

Banner A 468x60 pixel advertisement (either graphic or rich media) that appears on a web page and is usually hyperlinked to an advertisers web site.

Button A 120x60 pixel advertisement (either graphic or rich media) that appears on a web page and is usually hyperlinked to an advertisers web site.

CPA Cost per Acquisition (CPA) is one of the online payment models by which advertisers pay for every action (sale or registration) completed as a result of a visitor clicking on their advertisement. The publisher is normally either paid a set fee per action, or gets a percentage of the sale (typically 5% to 25%). This method guarantees the advertiser a customer as a result of an advertisement.

CPC Cost per Click (CPC) is the online payment model by which advertisers pay for each click through made on their advertisement. This method gaurantees advertisers will get a user to see their page or website as a result of an advertisement.

CPL Cost per lead (CPL) is a form of CPA advertising in which advertisers only pay for each actual lead or customer inquiry as a result of an advertisement. This is also known as Cost per Inquiry (CPI).

CPM Cost per Mille (CPM) is the online payment model by which advertisers pay for every 1000 impressions of their advertisement. This method means that an advertiser pays a certain amount for every time their banner is displayed, and so is often used for branding purposes. The "M" in CPM is from the Roman numeral for 1000, M, which was derived from the latin word "mille".

CPS Cost per Sale (CPS) is a form of CPA advertising in which advertisers only pay for each actual sale generated as a result of an advertisement. Payouts range from set fees to a percentage of the sale, and the length of time that a user buying a product after clicking on a publisher's advertisement varies from that session to 30 days (with the use of a cookie).

creative Used to describe the actual advertisement, such as a GIF banner graphic, which is displayed.

CTR Click Through Rate (CTR) is the percentage of impressions that resulted in a click through. It is calculated by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions to determine the average (mean) CTR.

default Term used by ad networks to describe a type of advertisement that is served when no paying advertisement is available. This default can often be sent to another ad network, and their defaults can be sent to another ad network, reating a default chain to find paying advertisements for each impression. Unless a default has been set up, when no paying advertisement is available, a PSA (Public Service Announcement) is normally displayed.

eCPM Effect Cost per Mille (eCPM) is the average (mean) cost of 1000 impressions, taking into account CPA, CPC, and CPM campaigns. This is a good way for publishers to determine which campaigns are performing best in their rotation.

Half Page A 300x600 pixel advertisement (either graphic or rich media) that appears on a web page and is usually hyperlinked to an advertisers web site.

impression The number of times a banner ad was requested from the server and presumably seen by users. It is often hard to obtain an accurate impression count as they can be undercounted due to issues relating to cache or browser issues, or overcounted due to requests that were not completed.

interstitial An intrusive type of advertisement that loads between web pages without having been requested by the visitor. Users then have to either view the advertisement for a certain period of time (usually about 10 to 15 seconds) before being forwarded to the page they requested, or they can click to skip the advertisement.

Inventory The number of ad spaces available for sale on a web site during a certain time frame. Determined buy taking into consideration the number of advertisements on a page, the number of pages with advertisements and the number of page views during a specific time frame.

Leaderboard A 728x60 pixel advertisement (either graphic or rich media) that appears on a web page and is usually hyperlinked to an advertisers web site.

Pop Under A type of advertisement that is automatically displayed in a second smaller browser window behind the current window apon loading or unloading a normal web page. Although considered less annoying by users, these advertisements are prevented from displaying by the popup blockers. Also known as Pop Behinds.

Pop Up A type of advertisement that is automatically displayed in a second smaller browser window apon loading or unloading a normal web page. These are often considered obtrusive and annoying to users, and so are often prevented from being displayed by software known as popup blockers.

Rectangle A 180x150 pixel advertisement (either graphic or rich media) that appears on a web page and is usually hyperlinked to an advertisers web site.

Rectangle (Medium) A 300x250 pixel advertisement (either graphic or rich media) that appears on a web page and is usually hyperlinked to an advertisers web site.

rich media A type of advertisement technology that often includes higher quality graphics, audio or video within the advertisement. Some popular types of rich media banners are created with HTML, Javascript, Shockwave & Flash.

ROI Return on investment (ROI) is the process used to determine whether the financial benefits from an expenditure, such as a advertising campaign, are above or below the amount of money spent on the campaign.

RON Run of Network (RON) means an advertisement will appear on any site that is part of an advertising network. As RON buys are not targeted, they tend to be the least expensive type of advertisement that can be purchased.

Skyscraper A 120x600 pixel advertisement (either graphic or rich media) that appears on a web page and is usually hyperlinked to an advertisers web site.

Skyscraper (Wide) A 160x600 pixel advertisement (either graphic or rich media) that appears on a web page and is usually hyperlinked to an advertisers web site.

sponsorship A form of advertising in which an advertiser pays to sponsor a particular section of a web site for a certain period of time. It may take the form of the typical banner and/or text that mentions "this section sponsored by...".

Square A 250x250 pixel advertisement (either graphic or rich media) that appears on a web page and is usually hyperlinked to an advertisers web site.

statistic The records that an ad serving software keeps each time it serves an ad and the ad is clicked on. These statistics may be as simple as total impressions and click throughs or more detailed info such as browser types, geographical location, operating system and more.

Banner Ad Networks

noreply@blogger.com (Henri "PAPA PUA" Duong) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:53:00 +0000

Tribal Fusion

Tribal Fusion have emerged as one of the leaders in internet advertising by only representing high quality sites with original content, and so are very difficult to be accepted by, although they do offer the highest paying campaigns and a great service.

Burst Media

Burst Media are one of the longest established online advertising network, being established in 1995, and have survived due to their high quality network of publishers and advertisers, and the great targeted ad buys which they are able to get for independent sites.

Google AdSense

Google is the leader in search technology on the internet, and their AdSense Network offers accurately targeted text adverts targeted to the actual content of each page, therefore being able to offer high eCPMs.

Casale Media

Casale Media are quite a new player in internet advertising, although have emerged as a top network, offering great rates for leaderboards, skyscrapers and pop-unders, and paying 70% of the revenue with a minimum payout of $25, they are hard to beat.

ValueClick Media

ValueClick Media is the resulting network of the acquisition of Fastclick by Valueclick in late 2005. This new combined network combines the best part of Fastclick, namely their impressive publisher interface and statistics, and Valueclick, which was their large international media selling team.

Ad Pepper Media

Ad Pepper is a rapidly expanding online ad network with offices all around Europe and in the USA. Established in 1999, and with this wide representation they are able to gain high paying campaigns for many geographic areas. Also, with NET 30 payout and a 50/50 revenue share they are a solid option in your ad chain.

Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN)

Yahoo Publisher Network offers a similar contextual ad program to AdSense, but aimed more specifically at a US audience with ads which although not quite as accurately targeted sometimes offers higher CPC rates and therefore eCPMs.

Right Media

Right Media are relatively new to the online advertising game, although have emerged with an impressive ad serving solution, and offering competitive rates, especially for US traffic on most creative sizes.

Canep Media

Canep Media are a new network offering publishers a pure CPM option to fill their inventory of all the most common IAB ad formats using the AdECN advertising exchange.

RealTechNetwork

RealTechNetwork is a relatively new advertising network, but is establishing a reputation as reliable and providing decent rates, especially from US/Canada/UK.

Accelerator-Media

Accelerator-Media are the online arm of eType, the huge UK advertising company, and so are able to get advertisers of the highest quality for your UK visitors, and therefore get impressively high eCPMs.

CPX Interactive

CPX Interactive have emerged as a great second tier network due to offering all the popular creatives with decent payouts, great support, and 100% sellout rates.

Joetec

Joetec is a decent second tier network, as they fill 100% of your impressions for most ad units, and have good reporting and excellent support.

Copernic Media

Copernic Media (formerly Mamma Media) have been around for a long time in the online advertising world, and have emerged as a decent second tier network filling most of your unsold inventory at reasonable rates.

Webmaster Tools

noreply@blogger.com (Henri "PAPA PUA" Duong) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:50:00 +0000

Spot Bank - Webmaster Directory

Provides webmaster information related to web hosting, design, tutorials, templates and etc. Find help for scripting and site development.

Spot Bank - Webmaster Directory

Webmaster Resources Directory

Directory of Webmaster Resources including hosting, promotion, scripts, services, tools and much more

Webmaster Resources Directory

321 Webmaster

Webmaster resources and free web tools a webmaster could ever need to design, develop, and manage a successful website

321 Webmaster

Webmaster Catalog

A human edited web and search directory with webmaster related resources and services

Webmaster Catalog

Webmaster Directory Network

General directory of tools and reources for webmasters

Webmaster Directory Network

Setting up Cron Jobs for phpAdsNew in Cpanel

noreply@blogger.com (Henri "PAPA PUA" Duong) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:19:00 +0000

In order for phpAdsNew to create accurate statistics and deliver ad campaigns with the weightings you specify, it requires you to set up a cron job. Although there are various ways to do this, as CPanel is one of the most common control panels on PHP/MySQL enabled servers this tutorial offers a quick guide on how to set up the relevant cron job through the CPanel wizard.

If you log in to CPanel, you should see an icon/link to Cron Jobs.

Once in Cron Jobs, select the Standard interface with which you will find a simple looking page, with a few menus to choose options.

In the ' Command to run' box, type (with your phpadsnew installation directory):

curl -s -o /dev/null http://www.example.com/phpadsnew/maintenance/maintenance.php

Select 0 Minutes, Every Hour, Every Day, and Every Month from the menus

Click on ' Save Crontab'

That's it, phpAdsNew should now deliver campaigns and create statistics and reports as you set it up to do.

Setting up a Default Chain

noreply@blogger.com (Henri "PAPA PUA" Duong) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 18:17:00 +0000

Ad networks can normally not fill 100% of a website's inventory, and the problem only gets worse with bigger sites. Therefore, in order to monetize all your pageviews, you will need to set up some form of default chain where any spare impressions from one network are sent to another network, and then any spare from that are sent to the 3rd network.

Most ad networks today offer some form of default option, often rich media defaults, where you are able to send any spare inventory to another network. In order to set this up, taking 468x60 banner ads for example, you will need to generate the ad code for your top network (the one with the highest eCPM), and then hardcode that into the html of your pages. To begin your chain, you will then need to generate the ad code of your second best ad network, and save this as network2.html and upload it to your server.

I have found it easiest to set up a subdomain on my server called ads, so all my default networks html files can be found at:

http://ads.example.com/network2.html
http://ads.example.com/network3.html
etc...

In the default interface of your top network, you need to set up a default directing to http://ads.example.com/network2.html, and then from the default interface of your second network, you need to set up a default directing to http://ads.example.com/network3.html, and so on, until you have managed to fill all your available inventory.

It is a common question to ask what is the best order to set up your default chain, and to be honest it really does vary for every site. However, as an example, here is the default chain I use:

and that tends to fill all my impressions, with the eCPM dropping by about 20% with each tier.

It is generally a good idea to play around with your chain until you are happy that your are recieving the most amount of money. In fact, Casale lets you run your default campaign as a real campaign through their interface, so if you say that your lower network has an eCPM of $0.30, then Casale will send any impressions to that default that they cannot fill with ads worth more than $0.30 eCPM. Moreover, many networks, including Burst Media and ValueclickMedia allow you to run multiple default campaigns, weighting them so you can split your default chain after that network into maybe 4 lower paying networks to try and bolster your overall eCPM.

Selling ads directly to advertisers

noreply@blogger.com (Henri "PAPA PUA" Duong) — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 18:16:00 +0000

Although ad networks will fill the ad inventory for your website, they take a percentage (up to 60%) of the CPM the advertisers are paying to advertise on your site. Remove the middle man and receive 100% of the CPM, and find advertisers more relevant to your users.

To determine what to charge:

Take a look at your competitors' media kits and see what they offer
- How does your traffic compare to theirs (how much and where from)?
- How does your content compare to theirs (quality and quantity)?
- How does your design compare to theirs?
- That should give you somewhere to start from.
Take a look at your AdSense earnings:
- What is your current eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions)?
- For most sites I would double your AdSense eCPM as a guide of what to charge.
Variations
- Different ad sizes would give different CPMs, with larger formats worth more.
- Ads above the fold are generally worth more than those below the fold.
Your Media Kit
- Don't make it too complicated with too many options
- Show your stats (possibly with graphs)
- Show your rates for each ad size
- Show any discounts you have for bulk buys
- Show all your contact details (email/phone/address)

Things to look for when doing a direct ad deal:

Research the advertiser
- Try to make sure they are legitimate and reliable
- Get some good contact info on them (phone/email/physical address)
- Make sure you know which individual you are dealing with for the advertiser
- Maintain good relations with the advertiser throughout the deal and after it for the chance of future deals.
Check the ads
- You don't want them to offend your users
- You most likely want them to fit your site's niche to get a good ROI for the advertiser for a future relationship.
- Take a look at the ads in the sizes you are running to make sure you like them
Get both parties to sign a contract
- Impressions/Uniques/Targeting/Time-frame/Ad Serving/Ad Reporting)
- An advertiser is less likely not to pay you with a signed contract (although that still won't guarantee payment)
- A good contract won't cost that much and can be used over and over again
Payment upfront
- The only way to guarantee payment is to get it upfront
- Ask for at least 50% of the payment of the ad deal up front as a guarantee