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Part 2: Standard Living

September 1st, 2010

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photo credit: Ian W Scott - "NUMBER THREE! Thou shalt not visit a Star Wars fan page without having to close 47 pop up windows for Viagra. I'm looking at YOU, Geocities!"

By Matt Cook
Point Click Media

Now that you’ve established which parts of your website are best suited for advertising, you’ll need to figure out exactly what type of advertising you want on your site.

But I thought advertising was just different sized boxes and graphics…

Web advertising can in fact be as simple as a logo placed on a page, but it can also be so much more. Web advertising can take on many different forms including everything from simple graphics to full video, animations or even contextual advertising.

No matter what method of advertising you choose, keep in mind that there are web standards to follow. For example, there are a set of standard ad sizes that are most commonly used across the web for banners, tiles, skyscrapers and more. These standards include dimensions, file size and length (if your ads are animated). For a complete list of standard web ad sizes, see the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Ad Unit Guidelines.

Do I have to follow these rules?

These guidelines aren’t written in stone. It’s not like Charleton Heston brought down slabs of stone tableture from Mount Sinai that said “Number Five! Thou shalt not exceed 40 kilobytes on all Skyscraper banners”. You can build all kinds of wacky sizes if you wish, but keep in mind that your advertisers will need to build custom sizes for your website, and it will cost them more, which can be a turn off for many advertisers. The standard works for pretty much everyone, so why deviate? In the end you’ll likely end up investing more in trying to customize your advertising than you would get out of it by sticking to the standard guidelines.

If you’ve decided to go the contextual advertising route and place third party ads on your website to generate revenue rather than enduring the labour of going out and finding and securing advertisers, it’s important to know that each third party program has their own set of rules for what can be displayed on your website. For example, when placing Google ads on your website, there are restrictions as to what you can do with them. You can’t place more than 3 on a page. You also can’t label them as anything but sponsored links or advertisers. Google ads work on a Cost-Per-Click basis so their guidelines are strict but very adaptable to any website.

I recommend reading the Google Adsense Program Policies before deciding to apply.

There’s a lot to consider when figuring out what to offer for advertising on your website. In fact, we’ve only really discussed a few traditional methods of generating advertising revenue. It’s often the campaigns that think outside the box that make the biggest impact, so keep your mind open to all sorts of advertising avenues.

In the final segment of this feature we’ll examine the factors you’ll need to consider when deciding on pricing for your spots. If you’d like to discuss what other forms of advertising that could work with your website, contact Point Click Media.

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Posted in Web Tools on September 1st, 2010

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