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Everybody wants to build cool Web sites and sell ads to pay for them and get rich.by Bruce Morris
When your site gets huge and advertisers are crawling all over you waving ad money around, the time spent evaluating ad banner management software will prove to have been worthwhile. The whole idea of such programs is to make the process easier to manage and keep track of. If you can automate the serving of the actual banners, automate reporting to your advertisers, and automate keeping track of your inventory so your sales people know what they have to sell, you should be well on your way to Web advertising riches. Now all you need is to spend time in the fitness centre so you won’t get worn out shovelling all that cash.
Ad management software performs three vital functions. You need to make sure the program you select does each of these things the way you need it to for your particular site.
If you have a fairly simple site with only one or two advertisers, you could just write a simple Perl script to rotate ad banners or simply paste the ad graphic on the top of each page. This works well and, using a simple search and replace tool, you can change ads fairly easily. If you want to get a step fancier you can put a server side include statement at the top of each page and put the code for the actual banners somewhere else. That way you can easily change all the ads on your site by changing the code in only one place instead of making a change to every page on the site. But if your site is large and you have a variety of advertisers with a multitude of banners and placement timing, you’ll need ad management software to keep from going nuts. So here are the main things you need to look for: First of all, can your server run the ad management software? Like other software, ad management programs are designed to run on particular hardware/software platforms. Make sure the Web server you are using is compatible with the ad management software you are considering. If you’re running on UNIX, be sure your particular flavour of UNIX is supported. Keep in mind that the ad banner code is simple and can be served on anything that serves Web pages – it’s the ad management software itself that needs to run on something particular. If you’re running your Web site using Apache on Solaris with SUN equipment and you really want to use ad management software you’ve found that only runs on NT, you could set up a separate NT box just to run the ad software. This isn’t as odd as it might sound. Ad management software depends on a simple line of code being added to an HTML page before it is served. The code can be in a template or dynamically served from a database. So the pages with the ad code can be served from anything. If you’re serving pages dynamically or from a database, make sure the software you select will work properly. Profiling pages stored piecemeal in a database and served dynamically on demand may require some fiddling to get the profiling options to work properly. The newer programs allow you to serve almost any type of multimedia ad banner you are likely to run into. Older ones may not so check carefully. Advertisers are beginning to discover new and previously unimagined attention grabbing things to put into banners to make them stand out. It used to be an animated GIF was about as fancy as you could expect a banner to get. The new HTML banners with drop-down lists, etc. are nothing compared to Java, Flash, Shockwave and other wild ad banners we’re beginning to see. Be sure you can add ALT= attributes to the tags. Some programs will let you add optional text that appears just below the ad banner like "click on the ad above" or something equally useful. Imagine ad sales go through the roof and you’re handling the money with shovels (come on admit it, we know you’ve had such thoughts). Your main ad positions are all sold. Will your ad management software allow you to place more than one ad on a page at the same time? Some sites have multiple banners on the same page. If you have more than one ad on the same page you may need to be able to promise advertisers they won’t have their ad placed next to a competitor’s ad or other ad that may not be appropriate. Proximity control is a nice feature to look for. Profiling users and serving particular ads to each user based on their individual interests and preferences is all the rage right now - and rightly so. It’s cool stuff. The best ad management software allows sophisticated visitor profiling and associated custom ad placement. If you have trouble imagining how this might help anything look at it like this: At its most simple, imagine someone coming to your site from Germany. Your ad management software sees the person has a .de domain name and decides to serve only ads written in German. Visitors to the site from France would receive only ads written in French. This makes sense. Advertisers might well be expected to see the value of having their ads only served to those who can read them – and pay a bit more for the privilege. At it’s simplest, this feature can make sure you don’t show the same ad to the same site visitor over and over again –let’s give them a nice fresh ad we know they haven’t seen before each time. Now let’s take this idea to an extreme. Suppose a visitor to your site spends most of their visit looking at pages about marriage and weddings. You might think it appropriate to serve such a person an ad for flowers or china, or wedding services. This is called "adding value" and you can charge extra for it I’m told. Now suppose that same person comes back to your site about 9 months later. Clever ad management software might then show an ad for disposable diapers to that same visitor. I’m sure you get the idea. I’m sure you can think up better things than this to do with such a feature. The list of visitor profiling options can get pretty wild. Many ad management programs come with sophisticated profiling options built in. Some let you customise profiling options and other programs let you participate in networks of Web sites that gather data on site visitors to share with other sites in the network. Members of the DoubleClick network can serve ads based on visitor profile information collected when people fill in registration forms at any of the participating sites. Member sites of the Engage network do not get visitor names and email addresses but can take advantage of reports of how visitors acted on other Engage network sites. Sites participating in the Engage network categorise each page on their site by selecting any of over 500 keywords and ranking them 1 to 10 for applicability to a particular page. Suppose a user visits pages on two network member sites that are ranked very high for automobile purchasing. Your ad sales guys could go to a potential advertiser and say something like: "we’ve got 3000 young, high-income males interested in buying new cars coming to our site next week. Would you like your ad to appear for them? Will you pay a bit more per ad impression if it only gets counted when one of those profiles sees it?" Even if your site is only about stamp collecting you can determine what your users are interested in and sell ads to companies trying to reach that type of buyer. If targeting is something important to you or your advertisers, be sure the types of targeting you need to do are supported. You may need to target ads based on information gathered on your site through a registration form or based on data from another database. Some programs will let you target based on information gathered in the Web servers log files. Not all Web servers are set to gather all the possible data you might want to use for targeting so you need to check not only if the software you’re thinking about buying will do it, but you need to know if your Web server is set up to gather all the data you need. Some programs offer additional targeting opportunities by linking a database of user profiles collected from other sites. Using log files, ad management software should allow you to target ads based on domain (net, com, edu, etc.), country, operating system (show a different ad to Mac users), browser type, and xxxxxxx. Using add-on databases, programs can offer targeting based on such things as sub-domain (aol.com, earthlink.com), zip code, SIC code, and on and on. Activity and Campaign Management Reports Managing banner campaigns on your site can be much easier (and more valuable to your advertisers) if you compartmentalise your site into "pools", or areas of interest. Good ad management software allows you to divide your site up into groups of pages that you can sell to discrete markets. You could group all the pages on your site that have to do with automobiles for instance, and create another group that has to do with food or childcare. These groups of pages could then be sold (for perhaps a higher rate) to advertisers that would like to reach these particular groups of site visitors. Be careful. Some programs allow you to set up pools only by directory structure and others will let you place any pages on your site into pools no matter how they are physically organised. Obviously you and your advertisers need to know how the banners are doing. Very unlike traditional advertising media, the Web allows you to give advertisers rather accurate reports about how well each ad is performing. Note I did not say, "performed". I said, "performing". If an ad is not performing well, why not change it? Why not change it right now? Why wait until the end of the campaign to analyse banner performance? We can argue for years about definitions of "impression" and "click-through" but this is not the place for that fascinating discussion. Let’s just say that if a site visitor sees an ad it is an "impression" and if they click on the ad it is a "click-through". Ad management software should prepare detailed reports describing which pages a banner is on, when it is scheduled, how many times it has appeared and how many times it has been clicked on. A lot more detail than this can be in the reports but these are the main things needed to decide if a banner is performing well. If an advertiser gives you several ads to run, someone should carefully monitor the reports to see which of the ads gets the best click-through rate. If click-through is great for one of the banners and terrible for one of the others, it might make sense to get rid of the poorly performing banner and replace it with the best one while the campaign is still running. Or at least have a look at the banners and think about why one is doing better than the others and design more like the good one. This is the whole idea behind the reporting feature yet I find few advertisers who actually take the time to go through this simple exercise. In my experience, most advertisers just let the campaigns run rather than taking the time to fine tune things. Offering this level of reporting capability may set you apart from the crowd but don’t be surprised if advertisers don’t take advantage of it. You not only need to be able to group your pages, you need to be able to be sure the proper numbers of each banner are served in the proper time frame. Good ad management software will intelligently examine the amount of traffic you are receiving, check to see how many of each banner needs to be served by what date and adjust the serve rate of each banner so they are served steadily over the campaign period. If you have to serve three thousand of a particular banner over a month, you could just serve them all up at once until the contract is filled. Proper ad management software will spread the banner impressions more or less evenly over the month based on the traffic the site is experiencing as the month progresses. Your advertisers will want regular reports and no two will want them the same way. Good ad management software will provide a password-protected area where advertisers can not only see the results of their campaigns but can adjust them as well. Some programs do almost instantaneous reporting and others only once a day or once a week. Some advertisers will request automatic emailed reports in what they will call "industry standard" formats. A good program will supply several pre-formatted reporting templates and let you customise your own to send to advertisers. Most programs will offer samples of reports they can generate and offer "demo" Web pages where you can fiddle with the reporting and management tools before you buy. Check this out carefully since you will want reporting to be as automated as possible. Advertisers may have different delivery timing needs. Some will want a certain number of banner impressions over a stated period of time. Some will want the ads to simply run like mad until the number of purchased impressions is used up. Some will want ads to only run at times of the day when their fulfilment centre is open. Most will want their ads to be served consistently over a specified time period. Most will also be glad to receive a bit of an overrun and some programs will allow you to set an amount to overrun just in case someone is worried about delivery accuracy. A nice feature is the ability to copy the details of a complicated campaign you have designed and use them for another campaign. Inventory Reporting Web page/banner inventory management is a feature many people don’t realise they need until they need it and need it bad. If you only have a few pages and a few advertisers you can probably keep track of it all in your head. But imagine your site gets busy. Imagine it is complicated with lots of different subject areas. Imagine you have a wide variety of advertisers and you can’t remember when or where you have unsold pages. Keeping up with sold and unsold inventory can become a real head ache. Many advertisers will want their ads only to appear on particular parts of your site. You’ll need page status reporting with daily breakdowns of site traffic organised by URL. You’ll need page forecasting predicting how many page impressions you will have well into the future (at least 2 months). You’ll need both of these but organised by section or by "pools" you have defined. You may need to know how many (and when) page views you’ll have in a "pool" you set up that includes pages on a particular subject that are spread around a number of different directories. A nice graphical tool to visualise all this would also be nice. Let’s get really fancy and ask our ad management program to print invoices. Some ad management programs will do so. If that’s an important feature for you, you might need to check if it can integrate with any financial or spreadsheet programs you are using. Browser Caching and Proxy Busting This is a bit of a side issue but a very important one. The nature of the Internet is such that you can never be sure exactly how many ad banners were actually served and how many people actually saw them. Most users have their browser set to cache graphics so pages will load faster. This would include ad banners unless the ad banner serving software is set to force the banners to reload each time a user visits another page with the same banner ad. Not only that, content amalgamators and portal sites like AOL store entire Web sites in cache on their massive servers so their users will be able to load the pages quicker. This means however, that your ads will be seen many more times than you will be able to report to your advertisers since you don’t know when or how much this is happening. Currently most ads are paid for based on the number of times they are viewed (impressions) so both caching schemes are bad for advertising sites. Many ad banner management programs claim to "bust" cache or otherwise defeat these caching schemes. There are some rather esoteric technical arguments about the best way to accomplish this but this article is not the best place to bring them up. Be sure your software selection includes attempts to handle the caching problem. So when your site gets huge and advertisers are crawling all over you waving ad money around, the time spent evaluating ad banner management software will prove to have been worthwhile. The whole idea of such programs is to make the process easier to manage and keep track of. If you can automate the serving of the actual banners, automate reporting to your advertisers, and automate keeping track of your inventory so your sales people know what they have to sell, you should be well on your way to Web advertising riches. Now all you need is to spend time in the fitness centre so you won’t get worn out shovelling all that cash. |
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