Positioning Your Ad Units
September 20, 2009 by Luke Manion · Leave a Comment
One of the most popular questions from websites and blog owners is where do they position their ad units. 9 times out of 10 you’re going to be governed by your existing page layout, but if you have the ability to move things around and tweak the layouts, you’ll greatly benefit from the changes. Don’t forget this isn’t guess work, it’s a science; we know what works and what doesn’t.
Advertisers and advertising agencies consistently ask for websites and blogs which have ad units above the fold (or sometimes referred to as above the scroll). This means when you load the website in your browser, the portion of the webpage that can be visible without scrolling down. Ideally we would like to see at least two ads above the fold. If you can’t do this, sometimes it is easy to position a leaderboard above the entire website, like by friend Benjamin has done on his website www.benjaminchristie.com.
Study after study has shown that the told left hand side of any webpage is the position which gains the most attention, even more so if it’s an Island ad unit. We’ll typically see this ad position out perform other positions in terms of click through rate and engagement. If you have the ability to move around content on the page, I would highly recommend positioning an island or skyscraper in this position.
Apart from above the fold requirements and the top left hand side, advertisers and advertising agencies also seek out quality and original content. They know that great content brings quality audiences. So where possible try and position an advertisement within the body of the content. Most online newspapers do this, position an island ad smack bank in the middle of the article. If possible once again try and get it as high as possible, to ensure that it going to engaging with viewers.
We often have websites and blogs apply to AdTorque for consideration in the network and we reject them because of the amount of ads on the page. The key is to keep the pages as neat and clean as possible. Having half a dozen or more ads on a page diminishes ad effectiveness, annoys audiences and thus advertisers aren’t interested. Advertisers have to fight for customers, that don’t want to have to fight to be seen on a page when they are paying to be there. Media planners and buyers not only need to ensure their advertising isn’t running across inappropriate content, but they also need to prevent their advertising from running across websites which are relevant but are cluttered with lots of ad units. Try and stick to a maximum of 4 IAB ad units on a page. That’s it.
So just to recap the key points here in Positioning Your Ad Units are;
- No more than 4 ads units per page
- Try to position them Top / Left
- At least 2 above the fold / above the scroll
- Have at least 1 ad unit within content
If you’d like our advice on where to position your ads, please contact AdTorque and we will take a look at your pages in detail and provide a basic report on how you should position your ads. If you’re not yet a publisher in the AdTorque Network, please apply here.
Publisher Ad Serving
September 20, 2009 by Luke Manion · Leave a Comment
For the majority of sites which are part of the AdTorque network, most will simply drop our ad tags into the code of the site and we’ll run 100% of the impressions. AdTorque runs on the Adify platform which in many ways is a huge ad server so sites don’t need the added complexity of their own ad server as well as all the business rules associated to get going. From a monetization perspective this is the most ideal solution as we are selling your ads around the globe.
However for a limited numbers of publishers (we tend to see this on bigger sites only) this isn’t the most ideal solution. We’d recommend using an ad server to give you significant control on how ads are served on your site. It also means that you run multiple ads through the one ad space. We see a lot of the automotive blogs that are part of our network think that they need to run a number of ad units on a page, like running 3 skyscrapers for example. Not only does this look terrible, but the clickability of the page also decreases which means your page isn’t performing and we could optimize you out of the buy. But this isn’t the case anymore, as most ad servers are free these days.
Unlike other ad networks, AdTorque is non exclusive with our publishers which means you can run other networks. However, we do ask that you provide us an equal allocation to any other network running within your adserver. So sites wishing to use an ad server typically will fall into one of these categories;
- Have an internal sales team and using the AdTorque Network as part of the ad serving cycle.
- Wish to use geo-targeting, i.e. running the AdTorque Network in the UK, USA, Canada and Australia and other providers in the other countries.
- The need to run a different ad provider in each category of the site ie AdTorque Network in the Car section and another provider in each category like Food, Travel, Small Business etc.
- Prefer to use multiple sources of advertising such as AdTorque and say Google Adsense.
The ability to run multiple ads from different providers will be very appealing to some publishers. We personally don’t recommend any one ad server to our publishers, but here are a few ad server related links to help you navigate the next step.
- Openx hosted – free, plus great geo targeting features and simplicity of use.
- Google Ad Manager – Very complex to setup, only suitable for very large sites with complex rules.
- Blog about Free Wordpress Ad servers
- 7 Great Ad Serving Solutions
Finally, if you’re a publisher and not part of the AdTorque Network, you can apply to join here.
