Defaults suck.

Low fill and high defaults suck. It’s true.

Double defaults, when your default ad also defaults, suck even more.

Don’t let it happen.

How to track down a blank ad…

It’s happened to all of us. The trick is knowing what to do when it does and recognizing that it’s nearly impossible to duplicate a blank ad reliably. Nevertheless, you won’t be able to get to the bottom of it unless you can duplicate it. Here’s what you need to do:

Download and install Firefox and Firebug (firebug is an extension of firefox that allows you to look at the underlying code in a web page easily).

Browse your site or preview your inventory using your ad server, but make sure you’re using Firefox.

When you encounter a blank ad, right click on the ad slot, and click on “Inspect Element” (see below).

Follow your way down the rabbit hole, by expanding each nested ad block, one after another, until you get to the most indented call – it will probably have an error, or be blank, either way, this is where the problem lies (if you’re not familiar with HTML, you may want to get some help with this step):

Save this info and get it to your web developer, ad network or ad server support – this is what they need to help you track down the problem.

Once you get this process down, no blank ad will be safe again.

Google Ad Manager = DFP Small Business

GAM will be going away, at least in name, and becoming DFP Small Business.

We all knew this was coming. The marriage of Google + DoubleClick necessitated a bridging of GAM and DFP (DoubleClick for Publishers) . The former having been a free ad server that Google launched in 2008 and the latter being the industrial strength, enterprise class, heavy weight ad server that every top site in the world has used to manage their ad inventory(primarily premium ad sales).

So, what does this mean? For most small publishers, very little now and in the long run it should be a huge win. If your impression volumes are “low” (not sure how low just yet but we’ll know soon), you won’t have to pay to use DFPSB. And you’ll continue to get access to DFPSB’s dynamic adsense backfill. I’ll cover this in more detail in a future article, but suffice to say, dynamic backfill is the key to the kingdom – adsense gets to compete with your advertisers and your remnant network for your inventory – at whatever CPM you deign them to compete at.

It’s also highly likely that Google will expand DFPSB to include their premium ad exchange – DoubleClick Ad Exchange. The Exchange ads the ability for participating DoubleClick advertisers or ad networks to also bid directly against your inventory, in addition to the Adwords advertisers, your networks, etc.

Now, if your ad volume exceeds the DFPSB “free” minimums, you’ll have to run the numbers, but instant access to, potentially, thousands of additional advertisers who MUST compete with your other ad buys is powerful.

More on this as we get it…

Q1 is dead, long live Q2

Why, Q1 2010, you've looked better!

And may your CPM’s not suck.

A note regarding publisher revenue at the start of Quarters – buckle in for some turbulence. It’s common for ad buys to end when fiscal quarters end. Today is that day. Often, the last days of a quarter can seriously rock with high CPM’s and delivery, while the first days of a new quarter can be quite the opposite.

Be patient with your ad networks and advertisers – it’s the nature of the business and regular as the seasons (literally). And, yes, they all know that at the beginning of any quarter they’ll be on the phone with all of their publishers explaining the decline.

Nevertheless, let’s hope for an awesome Q2. Happy CPM hunting.

Why your ad revenue no longer has to suck…

You may feel like you’re David to the advertiser:ad networks Goliath (and, guess what, you are!) with poor CPM’s, poor fill, few advertisers / ad networks, little competition for your inventory and little to no direct sales of ads – you know the story – but with a bit of work, all of this can change – for the tiniest blog to the high, but mostly international, traffic news site. Stick with me and much (all?) will be revealed. Here’s how it breaks down:

Control the value of your inventory
The value of your ad inventory should not be determined exclusively by the advertiser(s) currently bidding for it

Competition is key
Cultivate relationships with more than one source of ad revenue – force them to compete – leverage an Ad Server to make this happen.

Get dangerous
Don’t be afraid to master the nuances of this business – learn all you can – from eCPM’s to fill rates to frequency caps. Learn the lingo, the reporting and do it.

Work hard
Keep at it – here’s your job:

1. Seek out new ad networks (man cannot live on Adsense $.15 CPM’s alone!)
2. “Traffic” them in an ad server of your choice
3. Optmize – send your best impressions to your highest paying ad network
4. Repeat!

For most of you who are already doing the above steps and who still feel that your inventory is under-optimized, I’ll be addressing these types of opportunities in the coming weeks.

In the mean time, stay strong and keep at it.

B

Back from a brief intermission

Apologies for the detour. Life got in the way. But in the process I’ve had some clarity about the purpose of this blog and the types of lessons that my fellow publishers may benefit from. Over the coming weeks, I’ll do my best to lay out a few of the best practices that I’ve come to believe can help nearly any web publisher make a whole lot more dough on line.

Cheers.

Why is there a giant turtle on my home page?

the invader

One of my ad networks made a slight error yesterday and began showing a 1024×768 image of various nature scenes (including a large green turtle) in place of my 728×90 and 300×250 ad units. One such image appeared on my home page, pushing the entire page down.

I paused the network in question (interclick), notified them and heard back this morning that all has been cured – it seems that a product test made it into production and onto my site (and how many others?).

Has this happened to you?

Amazing how much our ad “fate” is not in our own hands, isn’t it.

Nice ad… where can I get one?

One of the best ways of adding high quality ad inventory to your site is to keep your eyes peeled as you browse other peoples sites for ads that you think will work well for your audience.

1. Know your audience and what ads appeal to them
2. When you see an ad on another site that fits that profile, track down the ad network who sold the ad(instructions for how to do this follow)
3. Apply to that ad network
4. Once approved, speak to your network rep about the ad you saw and where you saw it, request that you be added to the same channel/vertical of that site
5. Add the new network to your ad server/exchange

Ad networks rarely advertise themselves on the ads they serve, operating behind the scenes. From my experience, only Google and Adbrite actively tell you that they provide the ad in question.

So, you’ll need to do some web sleuthing to track down the network hosting the ad.

Hunting Ad Networks
You’ll need to be using Firefox, have a web extension called “Firebug” installed and be ready to dig into some rather raw HTML.

When you’re ready to go, find the ad you want to track down and follow these steps:

1. Right click on the ad (if it’s a flash ad, right click right before the ad) and select “Inspect Element”

2. The window will split into three sections. The top section is the web page, the bottom is Firebug (split into raw HTML on the left panel and CSS on the right panel)

3. Focus on the left panel(the raw HTML) and expand the highlighted section

Now the sleuthing begins – you’ll need to do some clicking and guessing as you traverse a tree of html and scripts.

4. Click on the nested arrows corresponding to the area of the page that you’re investigating (words like “ad” provide a nice clue)

5. Look for domain names (often listed as links) – these are your best clues.

Tip:Familiarize yourself with the various ad networks that are out there and look for domain names in the source code. If you find a domain name, but don’t recognize it, do a Google search for it or a whois lookup.

You may encounter an ad that is nested within another ad call, where the ad call still makes further calls. This occurs when an ad network cannot fill a request for an ad and passes the call back to the ad server or to another ad network on its own. In these cases you’ll need to follow the calls to their end to find the ultimate ad network hosting the ad.

This solution works for me 9 out of 10 times. I hope it works for you. Let me know if you have any recommendations…

Impact of the downturn on ad inventory and revenue significant, but there is a bright spot

Ad spending in Q4 is proving to be consistent with the impact that’s being felt by the rest of the economy. Display advertising, of the less directly measurable variety, appears to be taking the brunt of the hit while, astonishingly, search ads are growing through the downturn. One significant bright spot.

“Search marketing by retailers rose 33% year-over-year during the first half of the fourth quarter. Investments were made across major search engines–Google, MSN and Yahoo.” – source: MediaPost.

Adjust your ad mix accordingly(diversify), and stay agile.

10 tips for optimum ad placement and effectiveness

Ad placement is one of the keys to optimizing ad revenue. Some key takeaways that have worked well for us:

1. Optimize your display ad units and text ad units independently
2. Don’t place ads in the same spots on all pages, mix it up
3. Text ad units (Adsense) and 300×250 block ads can be blended directly into your content, increasing the likelihood that they’ll get clicked on
4. Make sure you’ve got enough inventory – use multiple ad networks
5. Use an Ad Server(Google Ad Server), Ad optimizer(Pubmatic) or Exchange(Direct Media Exchange)
6. Blend your content with your ads, do your best to reduce visual obstacles between your content and your ads
7. Respect the heatmap – place ads where you’d naturally look down the page


Google Ad Heat Map

8. Don’t cram too many ads ATF (above the fold) – take advantage of your vertical space, ads BTF (below the fold) can perform just as well if the content draws a users eye down the page
9. Design around the standard ad unit sizes to take advantage of optimum inventory of your display advertising(not text ads) – 300×250, 728×90, 160×600
10. Beware of your advertisers requirements for ad placement, number of ads on a page, and so forth

Additional resources here and here… Let us know what’s worked for you.