Features to Look For - Page 2
December 13, 2000
A basic, bare-bones ad management program can:
- Rotate different banners in the same space.
- Provide reports of impressions and clickthroughs for each
banner, either online or by email.
This level of functionality can be delivered by a fairly simple
CGI script. There are also several free or low-cost packages out
there (see the last section). Most sites soon find that they need
more advanced delivery options, which can be found in one of the
mid-range products. More sophisticated products provide targeting
(the ability to direct certain ads to certain visitors), as well
as more extensive reporting options.
Delivery Options
The simplest 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 display images may not be enough. Web surfers
get jaded quickly, and they are already tired of simple graphic
banners. Many advertisers are now using Java, Flash or HTML
banners, but not all the low-end 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 your not 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.
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. 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.
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, not jumbled columns
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 persnickety
all the time.
Some ad management packages can generate email reports (and
some advertisers demand them), but the usual way to access
reports on ad traffic is online. Online reports offer a couple of
advantages. They provide up-to-the-minute data, and they allow
the client to generate different reports on demand, such as
comparing data for different banners, or looking up historical
data for a particular time period. The top packages let you
control what level of detail advertisers are allowed to see.
Inventory Management
In order to maximize revenue, you need to have a good estimate of
how many impressions per month each section of your site will
generate, and keep track of how many of these have been sold.
Running different campaigns for different time periods, and
targeting different sections of a site can make this a complex
task. The most advanced packages generate inventory reports that
show projected impression levels, and the number of impressions
available for sale, for individual pages and groups of pages.
Robust Network Delivery
One of the things that separates the good mid-range packages from
the top-tier packages is the latter's ability to serve ads over a
large, diverse network of sites. Running an ad network, or
running ads on a large group of Web sites (such as Internet.com)
can require not only serving ads to different domains, but
serving them through different types of Web servers and even
different platforms, as well as interfacing with different types
of databases (SQL, Oracle, etc.).
A large ad management software implementation is a good example
of so-called "n-tier computing," in which program functionality
is distributed among several specialized servers, in this case
application servers, database servers and Web servers.
Banner Ad Management Software
Banner Ad Management Software
Currently Available Packages - Page 3
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