Category Archives: Networks

OpenX Ad Serving Funny Video

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If you would like to add banners to your website easily, quickly, and with all the features of a professional ad serving engine you should take a look at OpenX. You can go to OpenX here to learn more. If you have used banner serving technologies before you will realize they have all the grounds covered with features. Also in the past they were named phpAds, of course that was years ago and I loved them then. Now they also have a free version which is hosted so you no longer have to install any software. You can start today, serve ads, and have ads filled by their OpenX market place. This is a great way to add a banner internet marketing solution to your site or sites.

They also have an enterprise version and a funny video explaining what advertisers want, what publishers want and what their serving technology does. Watch it here:

One Trillion Data Points

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Online Advertising Report
Project Rubicon has just issued their online advertising report for Q3 of 2010 utilizing over 1 Trillion datapoints. As a lover of data I have to say being able to have that much data from which to make projections and or analyze the market is fantastic. You can find their report by following the link, as well as prior quarterly reports.

Online Advertising Prices Down

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Online Ad Prices
I read this article in Advertising Age about Social Networks Sink Online-Ad Pricing, it’s a good read. Advertising Age quoted some statistics from May 2009 to May 2010 from Comscore, here is the quote from Advertising Age:
“A recent analysis by ComScore shows social networks, primarily Facebook and MySpace, have over the last year drawn an average CPM of only 56 cents, compared to the $2.43 average for the internet at large.”

What Does This Mean?
You can draw your own conclusions about what this does or does not mean. Essentially markets are supply and demand and the better a market can gauge the value of a product or service, the faster a stable price will be achieved. Of course there are many factors, including supply and demand as well as effectiveness. Just because social sites drive inventory does not mean they drive hefty revenue. And it is amazing how easy it is to effect supply and demand. Imagine if Facebook has three ads per page and removes one, all the sudden inventory drops by 33% and individual ad CTRs and responses may increase (purely hypothetical). The same is true if they decide to increase advertising units on a page.


Why Should You Care?
The reason I wrote this is not to get into the intricacies of pricing and all the variables but to simply point out that you can purchase some cheap online advertising and test it for yourself, it may or may not work for you. Whenever you find a niche that is relatively cheap it is worth testing and then exploiting before it’s gone.

Yahoo and Microsoft are Search Partners

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Yahoo and Microsoft announced their alliance. How does that work? Or does it not work? We do not know yet. It remains to be seen. They needed to first obtain approval, due to monopoly concerns. I am not stating there should be a concern, just that there was. As they stated:

“Microsoft® and Yahoo! have now received regulatory clearance to form the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance in the United States and European Union.”

microsoft advertisingHow the Alliance Effects You
In a nutshell, get used to the logo at the right. While there is an “alliance” you will be using the Microsoft ad platform. There is Yahoo transition information and Microsoft transition information. You can find it all here on a neutral Search Alliance site. It may not be a fast transition however they state to have it completed by the 2010 holiday season but are not promising anything.

Who Will You Interact With?
What they decided to do was split up the responsibilities between both organizations. Yahoo will support what they call the high volume advertisers. Those that spend quite a bit, the agencies and resellers. Microsoft will support the self service advertisers and they will use the Microsoft adCenter.

Benefits
By merging these two ad platforms they will have a greater reach. They state that there will be a reach of up to 150 million searchers. Through the combination of both ad platforms there will be approximately 62% more search volume than on Yahoo! alone. Now for those that are currently advertising on both platforms you will only need to now log into one.

Top Ad Networks for Dec 2009

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The December 2009 Ad Network report was released from comScore. They provide statistics on the top 15 ad networks based on their reach. The sample size is decided from U.S. Internet users in December 2009.

You can see from the chart below that AOL Advertising had the largest reach. The reach is defined as unique visitors during the month. They also provided a percent change from the same month the previous year. The largest percentage change from the previous year was Collective Network.

See the full press release here.

Power of Flash Banners

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Why You Should Care About Flash
I thought I would post about flash banners with an example and discuss the “why you should care about flash“. Let us assume for a moment that you will be utilizing display advertising online. Let us also assume you have the proper networks, targeting, know what size banners generate the best click throughs for your audience, placement on the page, and you only have the option of paying on a CPM (cost per thousand) model.

Due to the CPM model, where you are paying for impressions, you must obtain the highest click through, and ultimately conversion rates, as you can. Many times flash banners can outperform static banners, and many times it can be substantially higher. Just going from .25% to 1% can take you from 2,500 click throughs to 10,00, and in some cases the increase in response can be even greater.

Types of Flash
You may be thinking that having something move, such as an image, is flash. However flash can be very interactive, here is an example of an interactive banner. This has a question that can be answered in the flash banner itself. Then the user is taken to the site.




In this case the flash banner is representative of the site itself and what the user will find. This will also increase the ultimate conversions.

Try Flash
For your next display campaign be sure to give flash a try. Most ad networks will accept flash as easily as they do a static banner. There are other types, other than flash, however not all are accepted easily and uniformly across most networks.

Hopefully this example will peak your creativity.

Run Banners on Google

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You may or may not know that you can run banner ads on through AdWords. When most people think of Google AdWords they immediately think of the text ads. The reason this seems to be the case is due to the fact that when you are on Google.com you will only see text ads.

However when you run an advertisement you are able to be on the Google.com site or on one of their publisher sites. A publisher site must opt in have banner ads displayed instead of text ads, or both. Therefore through Google AdWords can run Banner ads on the Google network.

Tip
If you are considering buying banner advertising a particular website, you may first want to check Google. Here is why. Some websites run Google ads, and some of them have opted in to banner ads. If they have opted in to banner ads you may as well check by using the placements within AdWords to determine if that site runs Google ads and if that site.

If they do run banners instead of completing an insertion order with them for a specific amount of spend you may as well first test them through Google ads when you can run banners. This is a great way to test the site’s banner ads and how they work for you without having to agree at a time to a particular spend. with Google you do not have to pay a CPM price you will pay a CPC price for the banners.

Track Google AdWords at the Keyword Level

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If you are using Google AdWords you may be using their conversion tracking. Conversion tracking works well when you control the landing and conversion pages to plant the tracking code. Here is a guide to google conversion tracking.

However, the above may not apply to you. You may be promoting others such as affiliate programs, or do not have the ability to use the tracking code or prefer to use your own tracking code so you may determine a customers life time value. What do you do?

AdWords Destination Links
First, realize that in Google AdWords there is a difference between the Display URL and the Destination URL. The Display URL is the URL that is shown to the user while the Destination URL is the URL that the user will be sent to when they click. They must have the same top level domain, but otherwise they can be unique. As an example you may see the link http://longest.com but the destination may be http://longest.com/page1.html?var=goog

Unique Links for Individual Ads
Using a screen shot from Google Adwords Editor you can see the display URL and destination URL. This allows you to assign a unique link for each advertisement. You could use a variable for tracking purposes such as: http://longest.com/page1.html?var=ad1.


google_ads

Unique Links for Keywords
Using another screen shot from Google Adwords Editor you can see the destination URL for an individual keyword. This allows you to assign a unique link for each keyword. You could use a variable for tracking purposes such as: http://longest.com/page1.html?var=keyword1. This would allow you to determine which of the many keywords you may be using are effective.


google_keywords

Make Money with Video Ads on Your Site

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This is a very important and powerful technology, so let me first say two things 1. I am not getting paid by CaptainAd, and I have to say this because my article may appear too biased in their favor 2. I love disruptive technologies and this may be one. Simply put, they can allow you to make money on advertisements within other peoples video as long as it is embedded on your site. That is amazing. Read on.


CaptainAd has a technology solution that will allow ads to appear in video regardless of the video player.

Publishers
On our site, any site with video, the idea of running advertisements within the video on your site is yet another additional revenue stream. Other technologies would require you to either use a particular video player or usually a video player provided by the advertising network that they control.

Expanded Inventory Possibilities
The beauty of CaptainAd is that it works with 27 different video players and I am sure they will add more. You can post videos to your site from sites like Break, YouTube, MySpace, Yahoo and many more. If you were to use an ad networks specific video player you would have to own the content, host the content, and then stream it into the player. However, with the CaptainAd system you do not need to own the content, just embed other sites videos in your site and you are done.

Video Players and Revenue in CPM
You will see from their site that they have a chart showing the CPM (cost per thousand) that you will make for the ads being shown. That is, for every advertisement shown using the video on your site with their technology, you will earn up to $1.00 CPM which is not bad at all. They have a chart listing the amount of revenue depending on the country you are in. You will also see the chart of CPM on the publisher page. They also have a list of the many video players it will work with.

Advertisers
As an advertiser, or anyone that wants to reach an audience that watches online videos, you can reach the Captain Ads inventory. I can only imagine how they can target, you may surprised, potentially they could give you access to individuals watching YouTube (as an example) videos and you would not have to go through YouTube to advertise. You can reach them through their site.

Advertise on LinkedIn with their DirectAds

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If you are looking to target professionals, or I should say individuals when they are in a professional mode, LinkedIn has what they call DirectAds. There are advertising networks, which by definition typically mean that they aggregate websites to provide reach across a network of sites. These sites can be organized by industry, genre, demograhics etc. You may need to use one if you are looking to reach a professional audience. However, LinkedIn is so large that you may find what you need at their site. Below I take a look at what they call their DirectAds.

Ad Types
The advertisements are text ads, not banners, however much like Google Adwords you receive a title, description and a link to your site or landing page.

LinkedIn Network
The DirectAds page states that their community is over 26 million, however the LinkedIn subscribe page as of today boasts over 30 million. Either way that is a huge audience of individuals on a professional network. They also provide the statistic that the average household income of the individuals on their network is over $109,000.

Small Budget
With their DirectAds program you can sign up, create your advertisement, and get started with a deposit as low as $25. Self service

Targeting
The targeting is interesting, you can target locally, those within a certain distance of your business. You can also target the types of people, such as executives, finance, human resources, the options are impressive.

Location of the Advertisement
Your advertisement is provided “above the fold”. If you are not familiar with this term it means that if you were to go to a webpage and not scroll down you should see the advertisement on the webpage. All the information that you have to scroll down to see is considered below the fold.

Right Ad – Right Person – Right Time
You have heard the saying “right ad at the right time to the right person” and this network may be just that for certain types of advertising. There is no question that if you were to look at one person and time slice their day, they may have family time, work time, eBay time, LinkedIn time, joke site time etc. However if your advertisement is to reach a person about a professional opportunity, your services, or a site, or newsletter, etc., then this may be the place for you.

DirectAds
By the way, I have no relationship with LinkedIn, I just find their targeted professional network reach interesting and useful for those that need that audience. Go to DirectAds and take a look.