How to investigate discrepancies – DoubleClick

The best practice is to always traffic DFA tags using the "DoubleClick tag" creative type. If you have trafficked, your DFA tags as a DoubleClick tag creative type and are experiencing a discrepancy of greater than 2%.

Normally, DFP records an impression as soon as the ad server determines which creative to send. When the DoubleClick tag creative type is chosen, however, DFP does not record the impression until the line item has been sent and an impression has been recorded by DFA. As a result, this process reduces discrepancies between DFP and DFA, typically to within 2%. The DoubleClick tag creative type will also eliminate the need to add click tracking macros.

If a DoubleClick tag is booked as a custom or third-party creative, this enhanced functionality is lost; DFP will treat the DoubleClick tag as a third-party tag. It will not report clicks without the DFP click macro, and you will see a larger discrepancy in delivery numbers (as you would with any third-party ad server). If you have trafficked DoubleClick tag as a custom or third-party creative type and are experiencing a reporting discrepancy between DFP and DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA), please see the “Third-party discrepancies” article. Otherwise, explore the following possibilities.

Discrepancies may result from:

Invalid activity filtering: DFP and DFA differ slightly in filtration methodologies, which can result in discrepancies in instances when frequent invalid activities occur.

Things to check:

• Has the correct DoubleClick tag been trafficked? Like DFP, DFA has many tag types, including one that is specifically intended for use in DFP.
• Are you comparing the correct objects between DFA and DFP? Which DFA ads are included in the placement for the tag you’ve trafficked in DFP?
• Have you or the advertiser made any changes during the time in question (e.g., reassigning or modifying creatives)?
• Are you looking at daily data or aggregated results? Break out the data by day and line item.
• Does the advertiser code load properly? Perform live tests on web pages where the line item should deliver to verify that the correct ad tag calls are being made.

Source: Google Support

How to investigate discrepancies – Analytics

Analytics packages (such as Google Analytics) measure different metrics than ad servers, so their reports will not reconcile with DFP.

Page views vs. impressions

Analytics tracking is based on page views. In contrast, DFP ad server concepts are, by design, not page-specific:

• An ad tag can be placed on multiple pages.
• An ad unit can be associated with many pages.
• A line item can be targeted to multiple ad units.
• A line item can serve to a single page multiple times.

Code execution

DFP counts impressions delivered to ad tags; analytics packages count the execution of analytics tracking code. Since these snippets of code are located in different parts of your page code, both scripts might not load or execute on every page view.

For instance, some analytics packages recommend placing tracking code at the bottom of your HTML. If a user exits a page before the tracking code is executed, the analytics package will not count a page view, but DFP will still count an impression.

Since there is no interaction between ad tag code and analytics tracking code, analytics packages cannot account for unfilled impressions, which can be caused by any number of variables:

• A lack of inventory
• Firewalls and misconfigured security software
• Ad blockers
• Intermittent network connections
• General latency

Iframes

Some publishers serve DFP tags in iframes. Browsers that don't support the <iframe> tag will not report an impression, but an analytics package will count a page view. Ad tags within an iframe can result in an extra round trip between the browser and server. This additional latency can cause some users to leave the page before the browser has enough time to make the calls to both the analytics package and DFP. If the analytics tracking code is present within both an iframe as well as the parent frame, the analytics software will register an inflated number of page views.

Cookies

Analytics packages typically require cookies to track page views. Some packages only record visitor traffic associated with a visitor cookie. If this cookie information is not available for a hit, or if a user has disabled cookies, then that hit may be disregarded.

Referrers

Comparing referrer URLs to DFP clicks is not advised. Referrers in analytics are not an accurate measure of clicks or landings for the following reasons:

• Referrers can be disabled by users.
• Internet security applications can block referrer data.
• Firewalls and proxy servers can filter referrers.
• Users can spoof referrers to prevent servers from knowing where they've been.
• Depending on the line creative type (rich media, standard image, etc.) and the ad tag (iframe, JavaScript, standard HTML, etc.) on the page, the referrer can be either “DoubleClick” or your domain.
• Internet Explorer does not send referrer data when switching from either (a) HTTP to HTTPS, or (b) any non-HTTP/HTTPS protocol (e.g., file://) to HTTP/HTTPS.

Source: Google Support

How to Read Doubleclick Ad Tags and Ad Tag Variables

The term ad tag is thrown around quite a bit, and can usually refer to any link involved in the ad serving process, on the publisher, or marketer side. Strictly speaking, Ad Tags are the HTML code a browser uses to fetch an advertisement from an Ad Server – it is a redirect to content rather than content itself. 

There are also click tags, action tags, view tags, and other more specific variants to the general ad tag category.  For this particular example, we’ll look at publisher side tag; because our purpose is to show how ad tags help publishers organize their content into targetable products.

Ad Tag Components

So, without further ado, feast your eyes on this example a DoubleClick ad tag:

http://ad.doubleclick.net/ADJ/publisher/zone;topic=abc;sbtpc=def;cat=ghi;kw=xyz;tile=1;slot=728x90.1;sz=728x90;ord=7268140825331981?

An ad tag can tell you quite a bit about how which ad ends up on a page – if you want, navigate to any major publisher and look at the source code; you can probably find a real-life example of a working ad tag. So how can you tell what the ad tag says about the publisher hierarchy and ad targeting? Let’s break it down piece by piece:

http://ad.doubleclick.net/ – this is the host address for the Ad Server – you can see that it is not a publisher’s website, but an independent technology company that has nothing to do with publishing content.  In this example, we’re talking about DoubleClick, the Ad Serving powerhouse that was acquired by Google for $3.1 billion dollars in 2007.

/ADJ – this code defines a specific type of ad call, and what the response can be, i.e., images vs. XML vs. scripts.  For this example, the code ‘ADJ’ is the most common and only returns images, which will serve via JavaScript.  Other responses can include ADF (only image creative in a frame), ADX (only image creative served through streaming technologies), as well as others. 

/publisher - this is the site code that DoubleClick uses to distinguish one publisher property from another.  For example, the New York Times owns NYTimes.com, About.com, and Boston.com among other properties.  If they are a client of DoubleClick, the corporation likely pays the bill, but each site would have its own site code so ads could be targeted to a specific paper and not the entire network.

/zone - the zone is akin to a channel level, so the Homepage vs. the Arts page, vs. the Sports page.  These content verticals are likely to attract different advertisers, so it’s important for publishers to be able to target to this kind of granularity.

Zone-Based Hierarchy vs. Topic Based Hierarchy

Here is where tagging logic starts to diverge in DoubleClick.  Some publishers prefer to deeply categorize at the zone level, while others keep moving down the hierarchy to the topic level.  The benefit of using zones over the topic, subtopic, category, or keyword levels that we’ll talk about in just a minute is that the zone is the last level in which you can pull historical reporting.  So you might have sports/baseball or even sports/baseball/nymets so you can pull traffic statistics going back months or years.

The downside with this method is that zones are vertical structures, so if you had multiple verticals on your site that all had a games section, you would have to select each games zone every time you wanted to target all games when traffic the ads, rather than just targeting a single “games” key value.  This sounds easy on paper, but ads up to lots of extra time for your trafficking staff if you have lots of subcategories in each zone.  It would not be difficult to imagine needing 50 zones or more per content vertical to tag to the lowest level of granularity.

That is why most Publishers tag at a higher level, and leave the granularity to the topic variable and below.  A great benefit of granular topic tagging opposed to granular zone tagging aside from being able to use the same topic tag across multiple zones is the ability for topic tags to handle wild cards when trafficking. 

This means if you had topic=newyorkmarathon and topic=bostonmarathon, you could simply target topic=*marathon* and ads would automatically fall into both areas.  This makes trafficking much easier, but has the downside of no historical reporting, which can be a challenge for your Yield or Inventory teams.

topic=abc – next in the hierarchy is the topic level. As mentioned above you can use the topic level to tag similar content across zones.  For example, games in multiple content verticals or within them.

sbtpc=def – next in the hierarchy is the subtopic level.  You might use this to target sports games vs. adventure games for example.  Again, you can use this to target across content verticals or within them.

kw=xyz – the keyword segment isn’t really another level in the hierarchy but a way to describe the page for contextual targeting.  The benefit here is multiple keywords are allowed.  These are typically used in guides and directories like a recipe, where you would want to be able to target chicken recipes vs. vegetarian recipes vs. winter recipes, and etc., allowing some overlapping targeting.

tile=1 – the tile variable sets a unique value for each ad call on a specific page.  If there were two or more of the same size ads on a page, separate tile values would prevent the browser from trying to serve the same ad to multiple ad slots at the same time.

slot=728x90.1 – typically defines the location of the ad tag, but is really just another type of key-value.  While this may seem duplicative with the tile value, it isn’t.  For example, tile values are often set dynamically, in the order they appear on the page.  So the first call is tile=1, the second is tile=2, and so on.  But websites use different templates all the time so the homepage may not have as many ad calls as a category page which may have a different number of calls than an article page, so the tile value isn’t designed to be a consistent variable for use in targeting.  The slot however, is.  For example, if a publisher had two of the same ad units on a given page, say a 728×90 unit at the top of the page and a 728×90 at the bottom of the page, the slot value allows them to target specifically to one or the other. That said, the publisher could just as easily set the value of this to anything they want, and it’s common to see sites re-purpose this key value for another purpose, use a text value such as “leaderboard”, or not use it at all.  See Jared’s post in the comment thread below for more detail.

sz=728x90 – defines the ad size of the unit for the ad server logic.  To be clear, this doesn’t restrict the size of the ad in the unit, it just provides a targeting attribute for the ad server.  If a trafficker were to mistakenly target a 300×250 ad to a market segment with a sz=728×90 attribute however, the 300×250 creative would still serve to the 728×90 call, it would just be cut off.  It isn’t uncommon to catch one of these mistakes from time to time as you surf around the web. Additionally, you can actually include multiple values into this attribute, separated by commas.  (Thanks to Jared for correcting!)

ord=7268140825331981 – this number is a random value better known as a cache-buster.  As users move back and forth between pages of content, they often return to pages they’ve seen before, especially navigational pages like the homepage.  Browsers today try to save as much content as possible to speed up load times.  

To prevent browsers from reloading the same ad multiple times (so publishers can maximize revenue and advertisers can get accurate reporting), a random number is tacked on to the end of each ad call so it looks unique to a browser and forces a new series of calls through the ad server. 

Source: www.adopsinsider.com

Ad server – An Overview 

Computer system which stores, maintains and serves (uploads) advertising banners for one or more websites. Ad servers program, track, and report several statistics about website visitors which are used by advertisers to custom tailor ads and offers to suit different categories of visitors.

How Does Ad Serving Work?

Interactive ads are everywhere these days, but when it comes to the technical process of getting an ad on the page and how publishers and marketers verify it delivered, not many people can explain what actually happens in detail.  Read this article though and you’ll be one of them!  Below I’ve detailed step-by-step how a browser gets from the initial call to a publisher’s website to the final ad creative, and when and how each party counts an impression.  You can view a diagram of the ad serving process at the bottom of this post – the numbers in the text refer to the steps labeled in the diagram.

So, without further argument -

When a browser navigates to a publisher website (1), the publisher’s web server sends back a bunch of HTML code (2) that tells the browser where to get the content (3) and how to format it.  Part of the HTML code returned to the browser (4) will include a coded link known as an ad tag.

Here’s an example of what an ad tag from Doubleclick, one of the major ad serving companies, looks like:

http://ad.doubleclick.net/ABC/publisher/zone;topic=abc;sbtpc=def;cat=ghi;kw=xyz;tile=1;slot=728x90.1;sz=728x90;ord=7268140825331981?

The ad tag points the browser to the Publisher’s Ad Server (5), a system designed exclusively for delivering and tracking advertising.  In most cases, the Publisher’s Ad Server is actually a network of cloud servers owned and maintained by a separate company.  In this case, the content server tells the browser to fetch the ad from Doubleclick, a company owned by Google that then makes the very complex decision on which ad to serve using a program called an Ad Selector.

In many cases the ad server is deciding among thousands upon thousands of potential options in mere milliseconds.  The computational power behind the Ad Selector is mind blowing – Atlas, the major rival to Doubleclick calls the supercomputer running its Ad Selector “WARP” and it is among the most powerful in the world, making billions of decisions a day and trillions in its lifetime. 

The Ad Server makes a decision, and in most cases sends back another ad tag (6), or redirects the browser by pointing it to the Marketer’s Ad Server.  These redirects are technically speaking 302 redirects, which tell the browser the page has been “temporarily moved”. 

This allows Ad Servers to count the 302 call as an impression and host the actual ad content on a different server.  Once the publisher’s ad server sends the browser a redirect to the marketer, it counts a delivered impression in its own database (star).  The only exception here is if the publisher decides to deliver a house ad or the marketer has asked the publisher to “site-serve” the ads, both of which requires the publisher load the actual creative files into their ad server, meaning the publisher is the final destination, and the browser can skip the loop through the marketer side (steps 7,8,11,12).

The browser now calls the Marketer’s Ad Server (7) and is redirected yet again to a Content Delivery Network, or CDN, (8) a global network of cloud servers that actually house the raw creative graphics to fetch the actual Ad. 

Why, you ask?  Well, as powerful as ad servers are, they just aren’t equipped to handle the volume and bandwidth required to deliver content as heavy as image files.  Redirects are often nothing more than a 1×1 pixel requiring just a few bytes of memory.  Image files on the other hand are kilobytes or even megabytes in size, could be called millions of times a day, and require a much faster and robust infrastructure. 

Ad Servers might maintain three to six data centers across the world, but a CDN can process the heavy bandwidth and deliver the content faster because they operate hundreds of data centers and can route requests to the one nearest to the user, no matter where they are on earth.  You can think of the ad server as the brain and the CDN as the brawn.  Ad Servers aren’t the only companies that use CDNs; in fact many websites host their bandwidth intensive files in these cloud networks.  A CDN is almost always another independent company, such as Akamai, that hosts the heavy creative assets so the Ad Server doesn’t have to. There used to be a handful of these companies out there, but Akamai has acquired almost all of them and is the largest player by far in the space.

Here’s what a CDN redirect to an Akamai server hosting a flash file looks like:

http://spe.atdmt.com/ds/ABCDEF12334/filename123_300x250.swf

In addition to sending back the redirect to the CDN, the Marketer’s Ad Server also appends a second redirect (10) back to itself with a query string to fetch a 1×1 pixel (11) after the ad content has been called.  When the browser fires this last redirect calling a 1×1 pixel from the Marketer’s Ad Server (11), the Ad Server knows the ad was successfully downloaded and it finally counts an impression in its own database (star).

In many cases, your browser has to make at least four calls for site served ads and six in the case of third-party served ads for this whole process to work, if not even more, but shouldn’t take more than a second regardless of the number of parties involved. To visualize the process explained above, please see the diagram below – 302 redirects are highlighted in blue, and the ad creative is highlighted in red.

Source: www.businessdictionary.com and www.adopsinsider.com 

Ad exchange

Ad exchanges are technology platforms that facilitate bided buying and selling of online media advertising inventory from multiple ad networks. The approach is technology-driven as opposed to the historical approach of negotiating price on media inventory. 

This represents a field beyond ad networks as defined by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), and by advertising trade publications Advertising Age, iMediaConnection and ClickZ.

The major ad exchanges include AdECN, which is owned and was purchased by Microsoft in August, 2007 but may have recently been closed down, Right Media, which is owned and was purchased by Yahoo! in April 2007, ContextWeb's Exchange, the leading independent exchange, DoubleClick Ad Exchange, which is owned by DoubleClick, a Google subsidiary purchased in May 2007, QZedia, Adkaw, Adbrite and Zinc Exchange, an exchange selling guaranteed impression delivery on newspaper sites.

Ad exchanges can be useful to both buyers (advertisers and agencies) and sellers (online publishers) because of the efficiencies they provide.

Source: Wikipedia.org

Online display advertising ecosystem

The biggest divide in the online advertising world is search advertising v/s display advertising. Search sounds exactly like what it is: the ads next to search results on Google, Yahoo, Bing, and competitors. Search is bigger than display by revenues, and much more concentrated. 

The benefit of search to advertisers is it corresponds much better than display advertising to intent.  A searcher for “hotels in Palm Springs” is most likely in the market for a hotel in Palm Springs. The other thing search has going for it is its easy and quantifiable — you can sign into Google Adwords with nothing more than your credit card, type up some text ads, and be running campaigns with impression and click reporting within hours.

The display advertising world is structured differently. Display ads are obviously those pictures you see plastered all over the sites you visit. There’s less intent so individual impressions earn a lot less money. Typically the prices are measured as CPM, Cost Per Mille, i.e. cost per 1k impressions. It’s also important to understand the structure of the market a bit. 

In the beginning (90s), advertisers pretty naively bought ad impressions millions at a time on popular sites. Performance was often evaluated based on pure impressions or CTR, click through rates. Ads were often sold on the basis of quantifiability — you could, for the first time, measure how many ads were seen, who clicked, how often, where he or she went, etc. As search advertising evolved, I think a lot of the people chasing quantifiable advertising moved to that, while display became more about branding. This, btw, is the value of facebook — brand advertisers want to be able to precisely target age, gender, income, and other demographics; on facebook, users freely and generally accurately share this information.

The display ecosystem has a bunch of moving pieces. If you look at the display advertising tech landscape graphic from Luma Partners, you’ll see:

Agencies 

These are the big advertising agencies that run most large advertising accounts go through. Companies like Toyota, GM, General Mills, etc, will give these companies tend to hundreds of millions of dollars to run ad campaigns on their behalf.

Media Buying Desks 

The ad agencies weren’t really capable of managing digital campaigns. That is, when ad agencies came about, your media outlets were maybe 10 national TV networks, radio stations, local newspapers, and a couple national magazines. And the media buying process was pretty simple: the agencies would send out an RFP that said we want manly men in their 40s who buy outdoorsy cologne and the aforementioned publishers would respond and say how their audience matched that profile. Compared to the online world of today, where there are thousands of premier publishers such as the NYT, ESPN, online magazine versions, etc; this was much simpler. 

Today, trafficking ads is an order of magnitude more work and advertisers must decide what they want to buy, where, on which site, when, with what creative, etc. So the agencies built or bought companies that have the capability to build digital media, traffic campaigns, optimize the ads, and create the necessary reporting. Eg Vivaki is Publicis, b3 is WPP, etc.

Ad Exchanges 

These are, well, exchanges where publishers and advertisers come together to sell and buy remnant ad inventory. Basically, there is premier and remnant inventory. Premier inventory is something like display ads on high quality reporting on ESPN or ads on articles on ARS Technica. These are often sold by in house salespeople in a process remarkably similar to how everything used to work, though people mostly email PDFs instead of sending faxes. Every ad impression that isn’t sold as premier is referred to as remnant, and these remnant impressions are offered to ad exchanges such as Right Media — RMX, owned by Yahoo — in exchange for a cut.

So the way this works is I can buy, with some rules, 1MM impressions on RMX and RMX will put these impressions on their publishers such as ESPN in ad impressions that ESPN didn’t sell in house. These impressions go for an order of magnitude less money than premier. RMX is one of the more technically sophisticated. The benefit for publishers is they get some money for inventory they didn’t fill. Just to be clear, a good eCPM for premier might be $20-$40 and a good eCPM for remnant might be $3-$5.

Demand Site Platform

A DSP helps advertisers purchase remnant ads across multiple ad sources including exchanges, ad networks, and individual publishers. A good DSP will have sophisticated targeting and optimization algorithms that incorporate first and third party data on behalf of the advertisers. Typically, a DSP’s clients are advertisers that aren’t big enough to go to one of the big seven agencies. Often these advertisers spend $10 – $50k / month, for example a local Toyota dealership instead of the national dealer chain, etc.

Ad Servers 

These help publishers. See Exp: OpenX, DoubleClick Dart, etc. Particularly for larger publishers, coordinating all these ad purchases is complicated. Your advertisers want to give you rules, such as user bleaching rules (only so many impressions to a given user per some amount of time), time of day, what pages an ad can run on (few people want to run next to naked folks, etc). 

They also want to be able to update and optimize their creative or even change the creative or the landing page they go to. Advertisers, or their agencies, also demand reporting — how many times was an ad seen. On what pages did users click on the Ad etc., within publishers the ad sales or monetization folks don’t want to be releasing the site every time they tweak Ads. Ad servers are internal or external software that manages all this and can be quite complex.

Data optimization 

This requires some explanation. In the beginning, people basically bought broad swaths of display ads. The value to optimization is the more targeted you can make your ad, the more value it has. My favorite example is espn: assume 10% of their online audience is female. If you’re an advertiser that wants to sell female sports jerseys, your CTR amongst women is 5%, your conversion rate is 5%, and a conversion is worth $50, your value per 1k impressions is 1000 * .1 * .05 * .05 * 50 = $12.5, so your CPM has to be < $12.50. However, if espn could pick out the women and sell the publisher only that segment (with some error, obviously), but say espn can enrich the demos so that women are 50% of impressions in a segment. Suddenly advertising on espn is worth 5 times as much for the advertiser and hence espn can charge 5 times as much. This is the value of data optimization. It's performed many ways, from things as simple as geo targeting and day part to more sophisticated demographic estimation, retargeting, and varieties of behavioral retargeting.

Re-Targeters 

Re-targeting is a simple idea. Say that I see cookies going to a site like a bmw forum. I might reasonably intuit that these users are interested in bmws and choose to show bmw display ads to them as they browse the internet.

Behavioral retargeting is the next step of retargeting. Plain retargeting is nice, but it suffers from a couple flaws. First, it has limited reach, ie there are only so many cookies that go to a bmw forum. BMW probably wants to reach more purchasers than just those. Second, it doesn’t really help generate intent. If you’re going to a bmw forum, you’re probably already pretty interested in bmws, so that may not be the best person for bmw to advertise to. Behavioral retargeting means any of a variety of ways of trying to figure out cookies to advertise to to get broader reach or cheaper acquisitions than retargeting.

The other big movement going on in the display world is the evolution of how people buy ads. In the early days — 90s — people tended to buy online ads in a high touch process with salespeople. Ad networks started which brought more buyers and fewer salespeople. Companies like Right Media — which Yahoo bought — started and allowed you to create bidding rules that run on their servers so advertisers can buy ads. So I can say that I want to, across many websites, target cookies that have visited a site or set of sites (retargeting), or show them so many ads per day, etc, and based on a variety of characteristics of a cookie and the site which that cookie is visiting and the web page they are viewing, $X is my bid for that cookie. 

RTB or real time bidding 

This is the new - now, instead of giving limited rules to someone like RMX, you register with Google (the largest RTB platform) or Yahoo’s RTB, and their servers, for each impression, send you a bid request. Your computers located in a server farm near their servers are given typically 100ms to respond with a per impression bid for that cookie on that page and that impression. See. Also, this is obviously an enormous tech investment. DSPs also help with this; most companies aren’t capable nor is it worthwhile to build this out in house.
Source: blog.earlh.com

How to Make Money From Blogs 

- Direct Methods

Different models that bloggers are using to make money from blogging into two areas – Direct and Indirect methods.

Direct Income Earning Methods - these methods are where a blogger earns an income directly FROM their blog.

Indirect Income Earning Methods – these methods are where a blogger earns an income BECAUSE of their blog.

Direct Income Earning Methods for Bloggers;

1. Advertising

There are many ways of selling advertising space on a blog (this could almost be a series of its own) but some of the different advertising options that I see bloggers experimenting with include:

Contextual Advertising – Programs like AdSense and YPN (beta) are very popular with bloggers and are probably the most common income stream being used by them today (MSN are developing one too). In short – these programs scan the content of your blog to assertion what its topic is and attempt to put contextually relevant ads (text and image) onto your blog. They are generally simple to use and involve pasting some code into your blog’s templates. 

Payment is on a ‘per click’ basis (referred to as CPC or ‘cost per click’ ads). Contextual ads suit blogs that have a particular niche topic, especially if it has some sort of commercial angle (i.e. it has products and services associated with it). They are not so good with ‘general’ type blogs (i.e., many topics) and/or political/spiritual blogs which argue just one side of a case (this confuses AdSense). I write much more extensively on how to use AdSense on your blog here.

Other CPC Advertising – There are a variety of other ad systems that pay on a per click basis which are not contextual in nature (which is important as systems like AdSense do not allow you to run contextual ads on the same page view as them). These systems include Chitika’s eMiniMalls (aff) which I reviewed here.

Impression Based Ads – Impression based ads pay a small amount for every person who views the advertisement. The amount that they pay varies from program to program (and ad to ad) and is generally a fraction of a cent. There are a variety of ad systems around like this including Fastclick (aff) which I reviewed here and Tribal Fusion. Impression based ads won’t earn you much if you don’t have a lot of traffic but can be great if you do.

Blog Ads – BlogAds have become something of an institution when it comes to advertising on blogs. They traditionally have had a focus upon monetizing political blogs but are expanding their focus lately. The beauty of them is that bloggers set their own rates and can accept or reject advertisers that apply to them to be featured on their blogs. These ads put the control of what ads show and how much they earn into the hands of the blogger. 

The downside is that if you price them too high you could never have any ads showing at all. They can also be difficult to be accepted into as a publisher as these days they only accept people into the system if they have someone who is already in ‘sponsor’ or recommend the new publisher.

Text Ads – Another increasingly popular way to sell ads on your blog is to look into text links. The beauty of these are that they don’t take up much room and that depending upon the system you choose to run them you can have control over which advertisers you accept and reject. AdBrite (aff) is one such system that gives you control in a similar way to BlogAds in that you set your own prices and approve all ads. They are also other formats of ads. Text Link Ads (aff) is another text link seller that more and more bloggers are using. The beauty of both of these systems is that they have a pool of advertisers already so you don’t have to go looking for your own advertisers. 

Their systems are also both very automated and are just a matter of pasting some code onto your blog. I use them both and while they don’t earn anywhere near as much as AdSense or Chitika for me they add up over the year and have done well for me. Bidvertiser and Adzaar are other system that I know are popular with some (we’ve used them quite successfully on b5media although I have little personal experience with them).

RSS Ads – An increasingly popular way for people to read blogs is via RSS. As a result publishers and ad providers have been keen to find ways to place ads in feeds. These attempts have been met with a variety of success levels. I’m yet to hear of too many people making big dollars with RSS ads yet but the ad systems seem to be improving. 

AdSense offers RSS ads to some of its publishers (you have to have a certain number of impressions first) as does YPN. Feedburner is a tool I’ve used to help monetize my own feeds – they give publishers three options (1. AdSense if you’ve been approved by them, 2. Amazon affiliate program and 3. If you have a lot of subscribers (over 500) they have an Ad Network). Pheedo is another system that you might like to try (although I’ve not had much experience with it).

Other Ads Systems – In addition to the above systems are many other advertising options which we’ve not had experience with and so won’t personally recommend. I’m sure they are worth experimenting with however as I see many of them being used by bloggers every day. Here they are in no particular order:

AdGenta, CrispAds, Clicksor, Intelli Txt, Peak Click, Double Click, Industry Brains, AdHearUs, Kanoodle, AVN, Pheedo, Adknowledge, YesAdvertising, RevenuePilotTextAds, SearchFeed, Target Point, OneMonkey, and TextAds. Feel free to add your own and tell us how you’ve gone with them in comments below.

2. Sponsorship

Another form of advertising that a smaller number of bloggers are using is to find their own advertisers. All of the above systems have the advantage of finding you advertisers (or at least assisting in the automation of ads to your blog) but as your blog grows in profile and influence you might find other options for private deals come up.

The big blog networks have people dedicated to the task of finding advertisers (often working through ad agencies) but smaller bloggers might find this worthwhile also. I’ve been selling ads on my Digital Camera Blog for two years now and as it’s grown in traffic and profile and managed to attract larger companies (who are willing to pay more) to buys space. Currently the blog features ads from Adobe who have bought a combination of banner, newsletter and text ads.

The key if you’re going to take this approach is to target advertisers in your niche that have products that closely relate to what you’re writing about. There are a variety of ads that you can offer them including banner ads, buttons, text links, mentions in newsletters and even individual post sponsorships. I would highly recommend that you always make it clear to readers that your post is a sponsored one when you’re writing a sponsored post.

3. Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs are where you take a commission for referring a reader who purchases a product or service to a company. Probably the most common of these for bloggers is Amazon which has tens of thousands of products that you can link to (I reviewed it here). Other affiliate programs that represent many different companies and products include Linkshare, Commission Junction and Clickbank.

Affiliate programs take some work if you want to get the most out of them (perhaps more work than advertising) but can be lucrative if you match the right program with the right blog/topic. If you want to explore affiliate programs more you might like to read 10 tips for using affiliate programs on you blog.

4. Selling/Flipping Blogs

The idea of selling (or flipping) your blog is one that many bloggers have in the back of their minds for ‘one day’ but in reality it is not something that is overly common… yet (I think this is changing). Probably the largest sale is that of Weblogs Inc (a network of blogs) which sold to AOL for a reported $25 million. Of course this is the stuff that most of us can only dream of – but there are examples of smaller blogs being sold, either privately or via auctions on sites like eBay and SitePoint. One such auction was that of the Blog Herald which took place here.

Starting a blog with the main goal of selling it down the track is one that I’ve heard of a number of bloggers doing but few have been successful. Rather than starting with this intention I think if you start with the intention of building a quality site that has a large readership and it’s own good income stream you are more likely to find buyers down the track.

5. Donations and Tip Jars

A very small number of blogs have a history of making good money with these (Jason Kottke being one of them). To be successful with asking for money from readers you’ll want to have a large and loyal readership (and a rich one might help too). Most bloggers just don’t have the critical mass or the cult following to make it work.

6. Merchandise

Another method that some blogs use with reasonable effect is to sell T-Shirts, Mugs, Stickers etc with the blog’s name, logo and/or taglines on it. This is another idea that will probably only will work if you either have a brilliantly designed merchandise range and/or you have a cult-like status as a blogger with some fanatical readers who are a little obsessive about your blog. Some blog topics lend themselves to this more than others.

7. Selling Subscriptions

The idea of charging readers for content is one that surfaces from time to time. While there are numerous websites around the web that do this successfully (community membership sites) I’m yet to see many (any) blogs do it well. The problem that most bloggers who have tried it have run into is that most topics that you could think to start a blog about already have free sites available. To make it succeed you would need to have some sort of premium/exclusive content and/or real expertise on a topic.

8. Blog Networks

Another emerging income source for bloggers is blog networks. There are two ways to make money here. Firstly you can start a network and contract bloggers to write for you or secondly you might like to join a blog network as a writer. There are many networks out there and all have their own strengths and weaknesses. I’ll attempt to write a post on what to think about when you’re looking at whether to join a network later in this series.

Source: http://www.problogger.net

Polite Ads

Working with non-streaming ads can be challenging. They often take a long time to download, which in turn can negatively impact the visitor's experience on that page. 

Polite ad formats were developed to address this challenge by enabling advertisers to serve larger file formats without disturbing the load time for the rest of the images on the page.

A polite ad format is loaded in two phases:

Phase One: The initial load is a compact image or SWF file that is smaller in size, so there is no delay in loading other contents on the page. This could be the first few frames of the ad, or a teaser.

Phase Two: The main load is the full version of the Ad. The full ad can have a larger file size. It is loaded only after the whole web page has finished loading into the visitor's browser.

Benefits of Polite Ads

• Serve larger file formats without disrupting web page content for a more positive user experience
• Provides advertisers with greater creative flexibility without compromising the experience of the user.

Source: www.mojorichmedia.com

Expandable Ads - An Overview 

Advertisers use expandable rich media formats to expand an ad creative into a larger creative upon a user mouse-over or click interaction. The most common implementations expand leader board creatives vertically into larger rectangles (i.e. expand from a 90 pixel height to a 500 pixel height) or expand 250x300 rectangle creatives horizontally into larger rectangles (i.e. expand from a 300 pixel width to a 600 pixel width). Many other implementations are also possible with the expandable ad format.

Benefits of Expandable Ads

1. Provide more ad space to share interactive experiences and information with the advertiser's audience.
2. Support the inclusion of any number of rich media features, including video within a single ad unit.
3. Allow advertisers to measure the number of ad expansions and the amount of time the ad is expanded, in addition to common measurements included in all Mediaplex rich media ad formats.

Troubleshooting Tips

1. "wmode" setting must be either "opaque" or "transparent" since the Flash ad needs to be displayed within a window mode (opaque or transparent). The default setting (leave wmode as empty) will lay-over the main content and it's not the expected outcome.
2. If multiple expandable ads are on a single page, you need to use distinctive DIV containers so they are not in conflict with each other
3. The default value for "allowScriptAccess" has changed since Flash 8. You need "allowScriptAccess" to be "always" so that the JavaScript method is called properly.
4. Since we set wmode to "transparent", if your Flash file has a transparent background, the CSS for the container can set a specific background color. You can use "opaque" wmode to maintain the Flash background.
5. If you need technical assistance with the HTML/JavaScript code for an expandable ad, please open a new ticket with the ad name/ID in your account.

Google Display Network expandable ad specs

Maximum Expansion size:

• For 728x90 - can expand up to 728x180
• For 160x600 - Can expand up to 320x600
• For 300x250 - Can expand up to 600x260

Expansion Direction: Multi-directional expansion (MDE) to expand up or down

Expansion Method:        Expand – On click             Close – On click

Maximum initial load: 50K

Max size per panel: 200K

Max Polite load: 2.2MB

Required control: Panels must contain a prominent Close X in 16pt font or larger on the corner of the unit

Audio Requirement: User-Initiated

Animation Restriction: User-initiated action must be 30 seconds or less (2 mins if video)

Other specifications:

Availability - Expandable ads are currently available to select advertisers with North American account managers.

Expansion Direction - Depending on its placement on a given page, the ad must be built as a multi-directional ad unit, designed to expand either left/right or up/down on-click. The ad may not expand in two directions at the same time.

Approved Expandable Vendors - DoubleClick Rich Media, EyeBlaster Rich Media, EyeWonder Rich Media, Pointroll Rich Media

Tags - Use JavaScript tags, not iframe tags.

Other Spec Notes - No restrictions on hot spots.

Source: www.adspeed.com, support.google.com and www.mojorichmedia.com