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Internet Advertising

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Types of Online Advertising

Advertising online can increase your brand awareness and promote a product/service. Online advertising has a major advantage over other types of advertising (tv, radio, print) because it is very easy to measure the effectiveness of online campaigns. In a series of posts, I’ll discuss the different types of advertising, their advantages and disadvantages, and how to measure their effectiveness.

There are 3 Main Types of Ads:

  • Rich Media: The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has defined these as “advertisements with which users can interact” and can include video, sound, animation. Ads which just animate but don’t have any interaction are just display ads (see below). Ads should follow IAB guidelines to maximize impact without being overly annoying (which has the opposite effect from what you want). There are many types of rich media ads, including:
    • peel-back
    • floating
    • expanding
    • transitional (interstitial, introstitial, exterstitial)
    • video
    • popup/popunder
  • Display Ads: These ads combine text, images, and animation (but are not interactive – those are rich media – see above) to convey a message. Display ads mostly differ in sizes (see IAB for Ad Size Guidelines). Here are some of the most popular sizes:
    • leaderboard (728 x 90 pixels)
    • skyscraper (120 x 600 pixels or 160 x 600 pixels for wide skyscraper)
    • banner (468 x 60 pixels)
    • half-page (300 x 600 pixels)
    • square button (or tile) (125 x 125 pixels)
    • medium rectangle (300 x 250 pixels)
  • Text Ads: Text ads are typically just that, text. These ads typically are cheaper, but have the added bonus of usually being searchable by search engines and are less-ignored by readers than some other types of ads. Some of the more common types of text ads:
    • link ads
    • contextual ads
    • search engine marketing ads (pay per click – ex. Google Adwords)
    • online directories

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Web 2.0 Expo – Optimizing Ad Revenue

In his talk, Maximizing Ad Revenue Through Format Optimization, Paul Edmondson from YieldBuild shared their data on how to change the advertising on your website in order to increase revenue. With so much advertising on the web, the audience has become increasingly blind to ads, which drops their click-through-rates (CTR) and revenue. However, very subtle changes to the ads on your website will prevent a dip in revenue (if you measure performance).

There are four pillars of ad optimization:

  • Ad Size – Size matters. 728×90 (leaderboard), 300×250 (medium box) and 160×600 (wide skyscraper) are the most effective ad sizes (with the most clicks). Different ad networks have different rates of success of selling clicks for certain ad sizes, so be aware of that when choosing one.
  • Format attributes – such as rounded corners, background colors, borders, font colors, etc. Grey background with little border works best. Try testing variations on link colors, font colors, highlight colors, of your website.
  • Placement – Design your site to accept the best ad sizes (see above) to make every ad account. Don’t underestimate below-the-fold value. A 300×250 ad placed in the center of the content will get better click-throughs than skyscrapers above-the-fold. For your title bar, ads aligned to the right perform best.
  • Ad Network – Choose the right ad network for your blog or website. Look for ad networks which allow geo-targeting to match ads to your audience. If ads served on your site don’t seem to match your content, try a different network.

For smaller websites who would like to try to monetize their content, try placing one great ad unit in a prominent position for a high-value return. Overall, keep in mind that more ads are not better and not only are they decreasing value on your site, they may be slowing down the load time of your site, which will eventually deter your readers (and then your ad revenue will decrease with less traffic).

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