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| Effective Banner Ad Campaign Management: view from an ad server ASP |  | ||||||||
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Article by Rob Costello, Developer of ADPUSH - Ad Rotation System | |||||||||
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majority of professionally managed web sites utilize banner advertising in some
form. Whether it's the standard 468x60 banner at the top or bottom of a page or
a series of smaller 120x120 buttons displayed along the right or left margin,
web designers depend on such advertisements to increase their bottom line.
The tough part is managing those ads. On any given web page, only a certain amount of information can be displayed at a time. This is true where advertisements appear. Only one banner or button ad can be shown in that particular space. If you're managing such a site and you wish to show 10 ads in that spot (say, at the top of your page), you've got yourself a problem. How can you have all 10 ads displayed in that one location of your page? Another issue arises with tracking statistics for your ads. Merely placing a banner or button on your page won't tell you how many times that ad was displayed or (more importantly) clicked on. The last thing you want is a banner ad of yours to receive little or no clicks. But how do you know how many times your ads are being served and clicked? The Benefits of an Ad Campaign Manager In comes an ad campaign management system such as ADPUSH (http://www.adpush.net). It addresses both of these problems. It lets you rotate a group of advertisements in one particular spot on the web page and it tracks useful statistics for those ads. Now, if you have 10 banners that you want displayed at the top of your page, you let your ad campaign manager handle them. Not only will all 10 of your ads be displayed in that spot over time (as each visitor pulls up that page in their browser), you'll know exactly how many times those ads were served and clicked. Other useful calculations such as "click-thru ratio" and "click-thru percentage" are shown so you can gauge how well an ad is doing (e.g., 10,000 impressions and 100 clicks, or 1% click-thru). There are other great benefits to using an ad campaign manager. You can specify how many times you want a particular banner to be displayed and/or clicked on. For example, one of your advertisers buys 500,000 ad impressions from you at $5/CPM ($5 per 1,000 banner displays), for a total ad buy of $2500. They give you 5 banners for their ad campaign and want each to receive 100,000 impressions. You add these banners to your campaign manager and "cap" the banners at 100,000 impressions each. Once they have been shown that many times, they will no longer be displayed on your pages. The same goes for the number of clicks, you can cap them at a specified number as well. Target and Schedule Those Ads Another feature is content-targeting. An effective ad campaign manager like ADPUSH lets you control which types of ads appear on a certain group of pages. For example, you run an online shopping mall with several departments. One of your departments sells music CDs and cassettes. You have several ads promoting the latest artists and you want them only to appear to visitors browsing the music department. Establishing a content group for those ads ensures they will appear only on relevant pages. This dramatically increases the effectiveness of your ad campaigns by targeting them to the correct audience. Scheduling ad campaign flight times is also important. Sometimes an advertiser wishes to launch a campaign on a specific date and time and then terminate the campaign at the end of the month. For capable campaign managers, this is not a problem. Merely specify the campaign's launch and termination times and the system will automatically display the banners in that campaign for the specified period. Once the campaign has reached its end date, the banners will be pulled from the rotation automatically and all final statistics for the campaign may be viewed. Automatically Monitor Ads for Poor Perfomance Other useful features are the ability to have ads monitored for performance. The last thing a web site owner needs is a poor performing banner wasting valuable impressions in the rotation. Many times when you setup an ad campaign, you have no idea how certain banners will perform. You also don't have time to hang around and watch the impression counts go up only to find that after 1000 impressions, not a single person has clicked your banner! With automatic performance monitoring, the ad campaign manager will keep an eye on the banner's statistics for you. Then, if the banner continues to perform below the levels you specify, it will be pulled from the rotation and final stats will be emailed to you. This also improves the efficiency of your rotation as all inefficient banners are removed, leaving only the top performers being displayed. Give Advertisers Access to their Own Campaign Statistics Advertisers often want the ability to check in on their own campaigns from time to time. Suppose a Microsoft rep proposes an ad buy for your site but they want the ability to monitor their campaign's performance. Setting up a special login id for the Microsoft folks is easy with the right ad campaign manager. Then you add the banners associated with the Microsoft campaign, along with other advertisers you're managing in your account. Since you've assigned a unique login id to each of the Microsoft banners, only those banners will be viewed when Microsoft drops by to check their stats (preventing them from seeing other campaigns in your rotation). All of these capabilities should be a part of your ad campaign management system. ADPUSH aims at being a complete ad management solution for online businesses of all sizes, from smaller, independent webmasters to large, corporate Internet enterprises. With its intuitive, web-based user interface and complete online tutorial and help system, web professionals can have a successful ad campaign up and running in minutes. Excellent client support is readily available in case you ever have any questions getting things setup. There is a full 30-day trial of the ADPUSH service with no obligations. |
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