Text ads come in several different forms, including link ads, contextual ads, pay-per-click and online directories. These ads have several advantages & disadvantages to consider before purchasing them to promote your website, products or services.

Advantages

• Cheap – Since these ads are just text they are usually the cheapest type of online advertising you can purchase.
• Search Engine Friendly – These ads are often are embedded right in the webpage which gives search engine ranking to your site. This is not always the case and many websites will demand that these ads go into their ad serving systems for tracking and security reasons.
• Attention – Since they are only text, these ads are less annoying to readers, so they are actually more likely to read and click on them, especially contextual ads. Readers are less likely to classify them as ads which need to be ignored.
• Easy – Creating a text ad is as easy as thinking of the text. Creating engaging text within the character limits can be a bit more challenging.

Disadvantage

• Limited – Most text ads have character limits which restrict the amount of information you can convey. Text ads by their very technology convey less information than rich media ads and some display ads.
• Little Information – Information collected about text ads is usually limited to impressions, clicks and possibly some information about who clicked on the ad (if the site has registration tied to their ad serving – more on analytics in a future post).
• Not Accepted – Some websites do not accept text ads since they can demand higher rates for display ads.

If you’re new to advertising, text ads are a great place to start for ease-of-use and budget.

Technorati Tags: advertising, ads, text ads, online advertising

Here are the basics for measuring the effectiveness of your display ads:

• Impressions: How many times is the ad served to a person (or as near as can be estimated). Impressions to search engine crawlers and bots should be filtered out (most ad servers do this automatically).
• Clicks: How many times someone clicked on the ad (and was taken to your website – remember to target the landing page). This should also filter out search engine crawlers and bots.
• Click-through rate (CTR): The number of clicks divided by the number of impressions multiplied by 100 for a percentage. This number will typically be pretty small. CTR of 3% is very good for rich media ads, but will quickly decrease the longer the ad is left on a website. Many CTR will be under 1%. This is an indicator of how effective the ads is or how many times the ad was seen each time before it was clicked on.

Also important are:

• Unique Visitors (UV): As near as the ad server can tell to the number of actual people who have seen your ad. This is usually measured by IP address (think of this is your Internet address) – but several people can share the same IP address (like all the people at an apartment building). This sometimes is measured with a cookie or login to a website to get better accuracy.
• Share of Voice (SOV): How many other ads are you sharing space with on the website? I’ve seen this measured in terms of share of impressions on the whole website or section or as the share of ads on a page (impressions is more common). More importantly, this is a measure of how many other ads are competing with your ad for readers to look at it. The better the share of voice, the more likely people are to notice and click on your ad.

Most important to measuring the effectiveness of any ad is how it is fulfilling your goals for advertising. Are you advertising to improve your brand awareness? Then the number of impressions your ad gets is important. Are you trying to sell products? Then clicks and click-through-rate are important as well as how many of those clicks are resulting in a sale on your site. Remember, statistics are just a tool to measure effectiveness. First you need to set goals for your advertising and understand how to use available statistics and tools to measure how effective your ads are at reaching those goals (more on that planned in a future post).

Technorati Tags: advertising, ads, display ads, online advertising

Some programmers understand JavaScript. They get it. They see through the ugliness to behold magic potential deep within your browser. Other programmers just think that first group is touched in the head. If you are a programmer you have an opinion about JavaScript. If you are not a programmer you likely don’t care all that much. That is, unless, you are in the business of buying or selling advertising online. Then you should care a great deal because JavaScript is the reason you have a business model in the first place.

Web Advertising, thought to be the only way to monetize this freely collected warehouse of information and services, cannot happen without a little event involving Netscape and Sun back in December of 1995. Earlier that year Microsoft had introduced the Internet Explorer browser as direct competition to Netscape’s Navigator. There was bad blood in the water from the start, mainly due to the incompatible natures of the way IE and Navigator displayed the same website. Both were secretly working on a proposed standard language to allow websites to do anything more demanding than showing some text and a picture. Microsoft had vbscript derived from Basic in the works. Netscape whipped up a language called LiveScript, partnered with Sun to get the Java clout, quickly renamed the language to JavaScript for PR, and launched it to the world. Netscape had the market share to win hearts and minds, forcing Microsoft to support a modified version called JScript. JavaScript was then handed over the the European Computer Manufacturers Association as a standards committee who again renamed it to ECMAScript to clear up confusion about the fact that JavaScript really has nothing to do with Java.

With one standard language behind the major browsers (eventually) we were able to do some cool things with our websites. AJAX, the crazy new buzz all the kids are talking about, is using JavaScript to do cool stuff to avoid refreshing a web page. So what does this have to do with your Ad sitting on someone’s site? Everything.

You see, a content provider is very unlikely to ever see your ad personally. Despite common sense, they do not insert your ad into their web page themselves. Most ads served from a page go through an advertising network like Federated Media. The network slurps up space on content providers and you pay them to put your ad out to the world. That means that, at a technical level, it is impractical for a network to email new ads to the content people to have them inserted manually. Usually these are entirely separate companies. To facilitate things, Ad Networks use Ad Hosting companies like AdJuggler (or similar technology internally) to store the ads and to generate JavaScript tags. These tags are like special instructions you give the wait staff to hold the mayo and have the dressing on the side. The wait staff sends the special order to the kitchen just like the content provider combines their content with the JavaScript tags and send them down to your browser.

Here is where it gets interesting. Your browser reads the JavaScript tag and follows the instructions. In this case, it will go out to the Ad Hosting company and pull down the ad that is associated with this tag, the one the advertiser paid to have up on your site. This is somewhat analogous to Network TVs allowing syndicated stations to insert local advertising to which the Network has little involvement. A content provider can be just as shocked as you are when your ad shows up associated with inappropriate content. Slow ads, broken ads, misappropriated ads are typically unrelated to the content that the provider is serving up; one has little connection with the other. It is the Ad Networks job to facilitate that part of the agreement and a good network will do that part fairly and professionally.

The answer to ad placement, traffic patterns, click through rates, Share of Voice are much more complicated than we want them to be. Understanding the little dance going on behind the scenes helps, if only a little.