From the category archives:
advertising
Amazon launches Carousel advertising widget
I got an email from Amazon Associates today advising that they’ve launched a new Carousel advertising widget. I must admit, it looks pretty neat.
Here’s a live example:
I like the idea of adding interactivity to ads. I spent a good few minutes just whizzing the think around for fun! I’ll let you know what the conversions are like in a few days time.
They’ve got horizontal and vertical versions, in a number of different sizes to suit your site. What do you think of them?
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An hour or so with Google Ad Manager
I’ve been after a good Ad Server for my FlightSimX blog for some time. I’d been using OpenX (or whatever their name is this week) for a while, but my old hosts asked me to stop using it as it was killing their server. I’ve explored some other options, but none seemed to offer what I was after, so I was pleased to be advised by Google that my Ad Manager account had been set up and was ready to use.
When first trying to access my account, I was asked to select my time zone. I only had a choice of US zones, so I dropped an email to Google and they kindly set my account to the correct UK zone. For some reason, you can’t do this from your account yourself. Not to worry. A quick acceptance of the T’s & C’s and I was in.
My first thoughts were “where do I start?”. Fortunately, there’s a bunch of tutorials and the usual extensive Help system provided that soon got me moving.
I did get a little confused over some of the terms, but I guess that’s only because they’re different to other packages I’ve used.
Here’s how I went about creating my first ad:
- Go the the Inventory tab and create a new Ad Slot. Think of this as the physical space on your site where an ad will appear. You specify the size of the ad, and you can also opt for Google AdSense ads to be displayed under certain conditions. More on this later.
- Go to Placements and create a new one. This one threw me until I read through the Help. A placement is really (potentially) a group of ads on your site. I say potentially, as it can be just one ad if you like, as was the case for my first ad.
- Assign an Ad Slot to your placement.
- You can specify targeting at this point if you wish, but I just left it at the default no targeting setting.
- Now, what I wanted to do was insert an affiliate ad to use in the slot. To do so, I created a new “Order” by clicking on the (not surprisingly) Orders tab. I then clicked on New Order and added the details of my ad. Watch out here, as mine defaulted to start tomorrow. This confused me initially when I couldn’t see any ads. You can also set pricing here, but for this ad, there was no price (it was my ad I was placing). There’s one setting on this page to really pay attention to, labelled “Value CPM”. Think of this as “Fake Value”! What it does is “pretend” that the ad is set to, say, $3 CPM, even though it’s real cost is, in this case, zero. This also works in association with AdSense. If you’re getting $2.50 CPM on AdSense and you want your own ad to take precedence, simply enter the “Value CPM” as some higher value. Neat.
- That’s just about it. Grab the code it generates for you - there’s a chunk to place between the <head> tags and some more to ad for each ad “placement” and you’re set.
This is not meant to be an extensive tutorial, but will hopefully get your started. There’s a huge amount of functionality that I haven’t even touched upon yet, like reporting, checking for free ad slots etc. I’ll save those for another day.
Anyone else using the Ad Manager? What do you think of it?
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Farewell Spottt
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been trying the Spottt “banner exchange” service on a few of my blogs. Having given it the benefit of the doubt for a few weeks, it’s now time to say goodbye. Here’s why:
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Site 1: 73,369 times on other sitesand got 110 clicks
- Site 2: 4,052 times on other sites and got 10 clicks
- Site 3: 6,271 times on other sites and got 12 clicks
People just aren’t clicking on the banners. Yes, it might be down to the design of my banners, but I don’t think so. I think people have already become “ad blind” to this type of ad. It’s for this reason that I’ve also dropped Entrecard from the one blog I’ve been trying it on.
Well, that’s freed up some more space in my sidebars. Off to look for some more widgets!
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Drive traffic to your site with Spottt
You may have noticed a new addition in my sidebar that goes by the name of Spottt. Spottt is, by any other word, a banner exchange. You upload your 125 x 125 ad - which seems to be the format of choice at the moment - then add a bit of code to your site. For every 2 every impressions of the Spottt ad on your own site, you gain a credit which will show your own ad on another site carrying the Spottt code.
I’m still in two minds about it. It takes up a fair bit of site space and it’s not bringing in much traffic on this site. Having said that, it’s bringing in a reasonable number on one of my other blogs, so I guess, like most of these things, it’ll have a different impact on different sites.
If you want to give it a go, they’re offering 1,000 free credits, but only for today. There’s nothing in this for me, as they’ve already given me my 1,000 extra credits 
To get your free credits, head over to Spottt and enter the promotional code SHAMROCK when signing up.
Let me me know how you get on!
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Inappropriate ad of the week
There’s always a danger when running ads on a site that the “magic pixie dust” will stick a wholly inappropriate ad just where you don’t want it. It’s happened to me on this blog before. A rant about people using fog lights when they shouldn’t left a raft of ads for people to go an buy fog lights!
On a more serious note, though, I’m sure Sky didn’t intend the following, especially when you read the last paragraph before the ad…
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