Online advertising today is a powerful commercial tool used by millions of companies around the world. This is a real win-model, which implies the possibility of obtaining benefits by both parties. What is meant?
Internet advertising is the interaction of two parties: the advertiser and the webmaster. Read more about what their roles are, and why it is beneficial for each of them to cooperate as closely as possible, read in our article. It will mainly be devoted to the description of ad units - how to create them, correctly place them and make money on it.
Benefits to Webmasters
First, let’s describe why the site owner (or, simply speaking, the webmaster) should cooperate with an advertising agency. Suppose you have a resource. Its subjects can be both commercial (for example, a description of irons), and entertaining (your poems). And the first and second is a site that people come to who are interested in the information that is posted on it. But between them there is a huge difference - purpose and methods of profit.
If in the first case you can start selling irons through an affiliate link from some online store, then in the second this option is excluded, you will not be able to monetize your resource properly. And believe me, there are many more sites in the entertainment theme . For these purposes, there are ad networks. Of course, there are a lot of them on the market, but there are only a few really large companies. The largest network is considered by the search giant Google. It’s called AdSense.
The beauty of the company lies in the fact that anyone with a website can work with it. And you can make money on your resource easily and simply, regardless of its subject (of course, with the exception of topics forbidden by the rules with content “for adults” and pirated sites). To do this, you need to create an ad unit for the network with which you work, and install it on the pages of your site. After that, as soon as a visitor comes to you, he will see the block and, possibly, click on it, wanting to learn more about a particular offer. You, as a webmaster, in this case will receive income. Sounds easy, doesn't it?
Advertiser Benefits
These ad networks have tens of thousands of advertisers. They all order accommodation in blocks for the reason that they need your visitors. And the charm lies in the fact that even in topics that, it would seem, are not related to commerce at all, there will always be users interested in buying a place in blocks.
This is due to several advantages of search advertising. She is very targeted. This means that using various filters, you can “select” those site visitors that you need. Evaluation criteria may include: country of residence, language, city, user's operating system. You can also choose the sites on which your ad will be placed, select them according to your criteria. It is both simple and profitable, because in this case you work with a narrow audience interested in your products and services.
And, of course, another plus of such advertising is its low cost. In order to place your ad, say, on TV, you pay a lot of money for the widest coverage. However, there can be very few really interested people. On the other hand, in online advertising you only pay for clicks - real visits to your site.
Reseller - affiliate network
The work of the “purchase-sale" scheme of Internet traffic is properly organized by the advertising network. There are plenty of them, as we mentioned above - they work with different block formats, have thematic features, some unique options in selecting and evaluating traffic. But the largest are networks managed by search engines Google, Yandex, Bing and others.
Due to the wide format of their activities, these companies have gathered millions of advertisers and webmasters. Accordingly, there is a demand for both the orders of the former and the resources offered by the latter.
In Russia, the Yandex ad block (offered by the Yandex Advertising Network company) and Google (created in Google AdSense) can be considered the most popular. Each of us can meet them on hundreds of thousands of sites. Since the intermediary is a large Internet company, working with him is very simple and effective, since he offers all the tools for advertising. Just about this we will talk in more detail below.
Advertising Tools
So, as we have already noted, there are a huge number of different tools with which you can place a link, banner or some other information from your partners on the pages of your site. Everyone can use this or that, proceeding from their own preferences. But the most popular (at least in Google AdSense) are two types of tools - ad units and contextual link units.
Of course, one or another of them can be applied depending on what subject of the resource, how harmoniously this or that material “pours” into the site design, how visitors perceive it. Based on these and other criteria, webmasters most often make their choice in favor of blocks. And this is very reasonable, which is confirmed by statistics.
Ad units are the media content (image or video) that the visitor sees. You can also include a flash banner here, since it is also often used in advertising. Obviously, the picture may be more attractive to the user, because of what he will click. Again, with the help of graphic images, information can be conveyed faster and more accurately than in the case of text strings.
Benefits
Ad units on the site have an alternative - contextual link units. This is actually a square in which various links to advertiser sites are placed. Each of them consists of three parts: the title, description and address of the resource. To tell you the truth, there are sites that adapt ads in the link block so organically to the design of their page that they can be confused with the resource menu. And in this case, of course, the user makes the transition, finding this or that title interesting. Due to this, such a tool is sometimes more effective.
And in other cases, the ad units on the page in their graphic representation are more interesting, and as a result, more attractive to the user.
Popular formats
As you know, certain sites may use different sizes of this advertising tool. This is due, inter alia, to the design of the pages where the ad units are placed, as well as the wishes of the webmaster. For example, someone prefers a small square banner, organically “poured” into the article, while others like the large vertical “skyscraper” on the side of the page.
There is a lot of information about what sizes should be blocks, which of them are more suitable for certain sites, but we will simplify it somewhat. According to research conducted by experts from Google AdSense, the most popular are sizes 336 x 280, 300 x 250, 728 x 90, 300 x 600 and 320 x 100 (for mobile devices).
Accordingly, these formats can be found most often, and the visitor’s eye is most used to them. Another aspect is practicality. Mentioned images occupy a minimum of space, although maximum information can be placed on them. The same sizes of ad units can be found among search giants. In AdSense, for example, when choosing a banner format, the webmaster also sees how the ads on his site will look in preview mode.
Accommodation
Installing ad units is very simple. To do this, put the source html-code on your site. It is presented in the form of a set of characters that enable the affiliate platform with which you collaborate to generate advertisements directly on the pages of your site. That is, you should not worry about connecting single advertisers - everything is organized very conveniently, as we mentioned above at the beginning of the article.
Of course, in order for your block to appear on the site, you need to determine not only its type, but also the place where it will be placed. After that, you need to refer to the source materials of your resource and insert the code.
Location selection
As you know, the topic of our article is advertising. An ad unit, placement of ad units is all that interests the advertiser, webmasters and intermediaries, except for visitors. For them, the abundance of online advertising can be a negative factor, because a person simply will not be allowed to find out the information for which he, in fact, visited your resource. This is bad if there is too much advertising. Therefore, the main advice - do not litter your page with a ton of ads. This will lead to a decrease in click-through-rate, which will mean a lower cost per click for you.
It’s better to decide where you install one or two ads so that they are as “inconvenient” for the user as possible. The visitor should not see that there is an advertisement in front of him - otherwise then he will not click on it.
Analysis tools
A few tools will help you decide where to place your ads. These are analytical services. Each major intermediary has them. The Google Analytics tool is recognized as the best in the world , which allows you to give the maximum amount of data about where your visitors click, what they look at more and longer, and more. Use these opportunities to understand how a person behaves on your site, and set a “trap” for him in the form of blocks. Do not forget to periodically view ad units on your site yourself to see it “from the outside” and to understand what and how can be improved.
Opportunities
The prospects for earning on sites are very large. Resource owners, creating content on their favorite topics, can easily earn more than they received in their main job. This makes it possible to earn on what you like to do the most. And this is very cool in terms of the desire to try and work harder.
conclusions
Today, ad units are a very useful tool for monetizing internet sites. Using some basic analytics skills, with their help you can significantly increase the income received from one website. And this opens up new horizons for people who like to do this. Experience shows that there are more and more such "Internet entrepreneurs" .