advertising

I’ve been using Google AdManager to run a couple of ad campaigns on two of my sites and I’m pretty impressed with it. See my earlier post for a quick “how to” to get you started.

One thing I really like is when you add multiple “line items” i.e. the ads themselves, to an order. For example, I’ve got a 728×90 slot on one site, to which I’ve added a dozen or so individual ads which get shown in rotation on the slot.

The clever trick is that AdManager monitors which ones get clicked the most and then gives them preference. So, if ad A gets, say, 20 clicks and the others get 5 over the same time period, it’ll automatically start showing ad A more often, as it knows it’s more popular.

The more I use AdManager, the more I like it. I still find navigating around a little confusing, but it’s getting easier as I become familiar with it.

I’m currently also using OIO Publisher on one of my sites (again, see this earlier post for more details), but I’m starting to think AdManager might be a better alternative for me. One major reason is that the single block of ads I’ve created with OIO Publisher uses a whopping 8% of my total GPU usage (that’s 8% of the total GPU for about 10 sites!), which is a hell of a big performance hit.

On my never ending search for the perfect Ad Manager, I’ve recently been trying out OIO Publisher. Unlike Google Ad Manager (see my earlier post), OIO Publisher isn’t free, but the asking price of $37 is very reasonable.

So, what do you get for your $37? OIO Publisher is primarily aimed at Wordpress users and they provide you with a plug-in - actually, a suite of plug-ins - which are transferred to your server in the same way as any other plug-in. Once transferred, activate it and you’ll find a new OIO Publisher option in your admin panel.

OIO Publisher satisfies many of my own personal requirements, which include:

• Accept payments via PayPal
• Automate placement of ads by advertisers
• Integrate easily with Wordpress
• Be easy to use
• Provide click tracking stats

Putting it to work

I’ve only been using it for a day, and I’m very impressed. I initially created a 2×2 block of 125×125 ads (they appear to be the “standard” for blog ads these days). In your new admin panel, you tell it you want to create a new “Zone”. This is an ad slot or block that will appear on your site. You set the dimensions of the ads, number of rows and columns, price per slot and you can also specify a default ad or ads to appear in unsold slots. Once defined, you get the ads on your site by simply adding a few lines of code into your template, or by using a sidebar widget.

You can see it in action on FlightSimX. I’ve got 3 default ads (affiliate ads in this case) and have left one as an “Advertise here” block. A potential advertiser can just click on that spare slot, add the URL of their banner, the URL of the target site, pay via PayPal and it’s in place. You have the option of specifying that you want to approve ads before publishing if you wish.

In addition to banners, you can also create text ads and inline ads.

I’m still only touching the surface at the moment. There’s customised tracking stats for both yourself and advertisers. You get an API key so your ad slots can appear on the Marketplace on the OIO Publisher web site so people can find your ads. There’s a whole bunch of options in there that I haven’t even looked at yet. I’ll report back when I’ve had more time with it.

I love the ease of use and flexibility it offers and at only $37, it’s a steal. You can use it on as many sites as you like and it offers a tremendous amount of functionality.

Of course, the real benefit in running your own ad server is that you get all the proceeds. No more paying ad services 40%+ of the cut, although obviously you’re on your own. You have to go out and get your own advertisers. I’m still undecided regarding this method of advertising for the blogs that I’m running. I plan to try it out for a month or 2 and see how it compares to my usual mix of AdSense and affiliate ads.

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?

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Assign an Ad Slot to your placement.
4. You can specify targeting at this point if you wish, but I just left it at the default no targeting setting.
5. 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.
6. 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?