You young fellers probably don't remember the old days of the Web, but old Chuck was around back then, and selling ads too, believe it or not! Way back oh…four year ago, we'd just slap an ad on a page like any other graphic, and the advertiser would pay us a flat monthly fee. Well, those days are long gone. Advertisers require far more service these days, and some of them can be downright demanding.
March 20, 1999
CGI Scripts by J.M. Ivler (http://www.wwinfo.com/adq/)
There are also several cheap shareware packages available, and a few of the medium-priced ad-management packages offer some sort of "lite" version at low cost.
Sites that are really serious about serving ads, especially large sites or groups of sites with diverse content, need more advanced capabilities that only a sophisticated ad-management package can provide. We'll talk about some of the features to look for, then briefly describe each of the most popular stand-alone ad-management solutions.
Advanced Features
Delivery Options
The simpler solutions use specific code for each advertiser. This means that if you change advertisers, you have to change the code on each HTML page. Not only is this a lot of work, but it makes it almost impossible to move an advertiser out of rotation exactly when their traffic target has been met, so you are forced to over-deliver on every contract. Sites with multiple advertisers need a system that can automatically add and remove different advertisers from rotation as traffic targets are met.
Advertisers usually want even coverage. In other words, if they buy 30,000 impressions over a month, they want 1,000 per day for the entire month, not 15,000 each of the first 2 days. The better ad-management packages can keep track of how many times each banner has been served, and continually adjust delivery to meet traffic targets on time.
Multiple Ads on a Page
You need to be able to serve different ads to different positions on the same page, so that you can use differently-sized (and differently-priced) ads in different spots. For example, you might have a standard 468x60 ad at the top of your page, a smaller square banner on a sidebar, and a low-priced banner at the bottom of the page.
Rich Banner Types
Just being able to serve images may not be enough. Web surfers get jaded quickly, and they are already tired of simple graphic banners. Some advertisers are now using Java, Flash or HTML banners, but not all ad-management packages can handle them.
Caching
Caching is a big issue, and many a lengthy diatribe about caching has appeared recently in the various online advertising forums. Since Web pages routinely get cached in various places, a substantial percentage of the ads your readers see are not being counted by your server, and you ain't getting paid for them, unless your ad-management system has a way to defeat caching, or "bust cache" as some say.
Targeting
Highly Targeted Marketing is a lofty goal of Web advertising, and there are several ways in which ad-management packages attempt to serve each ad to the most likely mark. Precise control over targeting is essential for large sites that cover diverse subject areas, and clever targeting can greatly improve clickthrough rates, or so the story goes.
Page Targeting
You may want to display particular ads only on particular pages, as the ads will be more effective if each is matched to appropriate content. The better packages all let you select which ads appear on which pages, and also provide some way to group pages of related content.
Day/Time Targeting
The better packages let you specify particular days of the week, as well as specific time periods, that particular ads will run.
IP Targeting
Many packages can target ads based on the various data that can be obtained from the browser, such as domain, operating system, and browser type. By comparing IP addresses to a database, various types of geographic targeting are also possible.
User Behavior Profiling
Some packages can track the path a user takes through a site, and build a "profile" of which pages were visited, which ads were seen, and so forth. This profile is stored as a cookie, so it can be used when a visitor returns to a site. You can make sure that the same visitor doesn't see the same ad twice (or choose to bombard them with the same one over and over!), or serve them certain ads based on which pages they've visited. AdManager's sister product, Engage, even maintains a database of behavior profile information from various sites that use the product.
Registration-Based Targeting
Sites that have registration forms asking for visitor preferences can use that data for ad targeting. Several packages have a provision for targeting based on user-provided data.
Reporting
Advertisers tend to like nice pretty reports with your logo and some neat formatting, rather than a jumbled column of plain-text figures. They also need precision, as they will be plugging your numbers into spreadsheets and comparing the effectiveness of different banners and different campaigns. Ad reports need to specify exactly what time periods they cover, and they need to be able to show daily, weekly or monthly figures as desired. The ability to export traffic data to external applications such as spreadsheets is obviously a big plus. There are many features you may want in a traffic report, but it really all comes down to this: making your advertisers happy. The key to this is flexibility, as advertisers are getting more persnickity all the time.
Unfortunately for publishers, serving ads is not a set-and-forget proposition. Advertisers need reports showing impressions and clickthroughs for each banner, and most will not take the time to retrieve the reports themselves from the Web, but will insist that you send them regular reports by email. Guess what? Out of all the major ad-management packages, only AdManager and AdJuggler can generate email reports automatically, at least out of the box (and AdJuggler's email reports are almost useless, as will be harped upon in greater detail below). This means that most publishers will need either to have a member of staff prepare a report for each advertiser every week, or do some custom programming to set up automated email reports (actually not as far-fetched as it sounds, as all of the Big Three, Ad Juggler, and several others make their APIs available).
I find it a bit puzzling that, while so many advertisers demand reports by email, so few of the major ad-management packages can generate them (although several simple and cheap shareware solutions can). The answer to the puzzle, I believe, is that the big boys were designed with rep firms and ad networks in mind, rather than publishers. A rep firm's job is to interface between clients and publishers, and they have plenty of grunts who can fish up a report off the Web every Monday morning, and convert it to whatever format the fussy client is hollering for this week. Of course, this is one of the reasons that so many publishers are turning over their ad management to rep firms, or networks.
For those who will take the time to access them, online reports actually offer a couple of advantages. They provide up-to-the-minute data, and the client has a certain amount of flexibility in generating different reports on demand, perhaps for a particular time period. Most of the major packages let you control what level of detail advertisers are allowed to see.
My experience in the ad business has been that no matter how great your reports are, there will always be clients who demand something different. Some advertising agencies even insist on using their own ad serving system, so that they can keep track of the traffic statistics on their end. Packages that can handle "rich" banner formats can usually handle serving a snippett of code instead of a graphic, so these networks can be integrated into your system.
Simple ASCII reports for emailing have a couple of big drawbacks. First, they simply don't look pretty. Remember, the ones who'll be reading these reports are marketing types. Second, a wide variety of email clients are in use these days, and they violently disagree about how carriage returns and tabs should be handled. A report that lines up perfectly in Eudora may end up a jumbled mess in Outlook or Lotus Notes. All too often, an ASCII report ends up so mangled that it is almost impossible to tell which column is which. An ideal ad-management package would be able to generate HTML reports, and send them out automatically as email attachments. The same reports should also be viewable online. A nice bonus is the ability to customize the reports to use your logo and color scheme.
In the next section of this article, we'll take a look at available packages one by one, beginning with the cheapest. To see the specs, prices and contact info for all the products mentioned here, see the Product Comparison Chart.
This article is in three parts:
