Internet Advertising Comes In Flavors
Regular Old Banner Ads
Well-done banner ad campaigns will continue to be the staple of Internet advertising for the immediate future. Studies show banners are terribly good at generating traffic through click-throughs but have a powerful branding effect. Matching site content to banner ad subject can certainly increase their power. Selecting a banner to display based on the observed personal preferences and interests of a visitor is a hugely powerful sales tool. The potential for rich media enhanced, targeted banners is huge.
Mailing Lists & Newsletters
This is another ‘killer app’. Opt-in mailing lists can hit very, very specific demographics. Carefully done, these can be the people who really want to see your ad because they’re trying to decide if they want to buy your product or one like it. This is such a hot topic I’m not going to talk about it anymore. I want to keep my mailing list moneymaking secrets to myself.
Sponsorships
If you ‘sponsor’ a section of a site you can integrate your advertising message and branding elements a bit more unobtrusively than you can with just a banner at the top. You might also be able to have your regular ads and have "these cool pages sponsored by . . ." appear on the pages you’re sponsoring. You may get a bit more exposure and can get closer integration with content.
Interstials
According to the Oxford English Dictionary interstitial means:
a. An intervening space (usually, empty); esp. a relatively small or narrow space, between things; a narrow opening, chink, or crevice.
On the Web, interstitial ads are usually pages or a variety of pop-up boxes that appear mysteriously after you click on a link but before you get to the place you clicked to get to. An interstitial page might open and close automatically. These can be highly effective if done well. Alternatively they can be quite annoying. Interstials can be quite profitably trained to appear during file downloads. If they’re interesting they will remain on screen for far longer than the usual banner so the CPM should be quite high.
Rich Media – What the Hell Is It?
Right now this term seems to mean a more-or-less normal-sized banner ad that uses Java, HTML or what have you to make the ad have drop-down boxes, wiggly bits, sound on mouse-over, small games or . . ? Some ad serving software programs barf serving rich media but it's a must-have if you want to sell ads to some of the more switched-on companies. Both visitors and sites like them because you don’t have to actually leave the site to interact with the banner. Clickthrough can be quite high.
Keyword Advertising
This can be quite effective. What you do is pay a search engine, directory or site to have your ad or link to your site pop up first when someone does a search on the keywords you buy. When someone does a search using the word ‘widget’, your stuff comes up on top of the list and/or your banner ad is at the top of the page. The best words like ‘sex’ and ‘Claudia Schiffer’ are going to be sold out or very expensive. The less-searched on words can be cheaper but can also bring a very valuable targeted person to your site. By now everyone's heard about the old misspelling trick. If someone else has already bought the keyword ‘hamburger’, you could probably buy slight misspellings like ‘hmburger’ or ‘hamburgr’ cheap that would still get you good action.
Coupon Deals
Digital coupons that give you special deals for ecommerce purchases or printable coupons avail the advertiser of the opportunity to do all the wonderful and horrible things traditionally possible with coupons, but now you can do it on the Web. We haven’t seen the last of this.
Pay Per Click or Pay Per Sale or Whatever
These deals usually suck. Be careful. Because people buying ads would like to get a bit more secure return on their investment, there is pressure for sites to run ads and be paid a bit more than usual but only when someone actually clicks on the banner or clicks on the banner, gets to the target site and buys something. Or some variation of this theme. Such deals are fine for the people buying the ads but do not tend to pay off well for the advertising sites. Advertisers are probably better off forgoing such deals and keeping their site visitors hanging around longer. Some people will actually click on the ads and you'll lose them. The payoff on these deals is usually a very small percentage of a very improbable sale to start with. These programs drive average CPMs down across the industry. I guess I should just come right out and say it: these deals suck.
Remainder Programs & Ad Auctions
Some of these deals suck. Some are good. Be careful. If you cannot sell all the page views you have on your site, you can sign up for programs where you get a constant flow of ads automatically delivered to the pages you specify. The pay for these types of deals is usually very low and many of the ads will be pay per click, pay per sale or other such nebulous promise of pay. At the best you might get enough income from one of these programs to pay a bit of your overhead each month. These programs work only because so many sites are starved for any ad income at all. They’ll go for anything. But having these types of ads at the top of your pages puts you into a lower tier quality of site. Advertising buyers know the ads when they see them. They'll instantly know you're running ads for peanuts. Why should they pay your card rate? You'll probably let them have the space for free if they ask nice. These programs drive average CPMs down across the industry.
Ad auction networks divvy up remainder (or possibly prime in some cases) inventory based on a variety of programs to ‘auction’ chunk or bundles of networked ad inventory. Some basically conduct an auction of space submitted by sites and then let buyer and seller worry about banner delivery, serving, etc. - they just handle the money. Other auction networks let you put ad serving code on as many of your pages as you like as do many other sites. The inventory from all the sites is then auctioned off in blocks and ads served equally to all. The money is split up according to how many ads each site actually serves.
These networks could well develop into something quite interesting for the Web ad business. But from what I can tell neither of these models are paying very much money to sites. The rates can be pitifully low - under $1 CPM. There has been one spectacular failure of one such ad auction business. I think the business will mature.
