Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
A common misunderstanding about ad rotation is how the time
is split up among banners. If you maintain your own Web site, you
may have seen ad rotation scripts that other developers have so
kindly distributed free of charge. Most of them (that I
Inside Advertising
When purchasing the
banner placements on
Web sites, the placements
are bought in blocks of
1000 impressions. The
price of those blocks,
which can range
anywhere from $2 all the
way up to $100
ve seen) dis-
play different ads, which have been predetermined by you, based
on percentages. For example, you may tell the script to show ban-
ner A 75% of the time and banner B the other 25% of the time.
However, running banners with ad servers doesn
'
t work quite
exactly the same way due to the fact that percentages vary greatly
from site to site. Where two million impressions may be equal to
1% on a very popular and busy site, that same two million may be
equal to 50% on a less popular site. So instead, the percentage is
set across the entire ad campaign. Using the same banners from
the previous example, you can look at it like this: If banner A is set
to run 75% of the time across an entire campaign then banner A
will be shown three times before banner B is displayed regardless
of the site that each ad is running on.
'
$200 for
standard Flash banners
and an additional cost
from around 80 cents to
around $5 for rich-media
banners, is known as the
cost per thousand (CPM,
where the M is the roman
numeral for one thousand).
The actual percentage that
your purchase works out to
will vary from site to site
and that percentage is
called the share of voice.
-
Ad-Server Tools
A huge plus to using an ad-serving company to host your banners is
not only the level of control you keep on your work, but the set of tools
they have available to help you achieve that control. The ad-server
tools allow you to set up your entire campaign, upload your work,
enter every piece of important information that pertains to the cam-
paign, and have the ability to actually look back at that information to
track how the campaign is performing. I
'
ll go into more detail on track-
ing later in this chapter.
Each ad server is different, but they all have pretty much the same
capabilities when it comes to the workflow for getting your banners up
and running. Here
s a very general breakdown of the steps involved.
1. Enter your media plan.
2. Load your banner files and landing page URL.
3. Test your banners.
4. Assign each banner to its placement to get the
'
“
tag.
”
5. Send the
“
tag
”
to the site that is running your ad.
Enter Your Media Plan
The first step involved in getting your banners running on an ad
server is to enter the media plan into the ad-server tool. The media
plan will consist of items such as the placements for your banners,
the number of impressions that have been purchased for the cam-
paign, all of the costs involved with running the banners (such as
the cost of the impression), and the dates your banners will actu-
ally be running. This information will be extremely important in
tracking the performance of your ads.
