Help me enable advertising on my website/blog

March 29, 2007 5:08 PM

What's the best way to implement non-Adsense advertising on my website?

I run a marginally successful website and blog. I'm doing well with Adsense. Recently, some companies have approached me about advertising on my website. I haven't gone anywhere with this, because I don't know what to do.

I've looked in the archives in AskMe. I've checked out Text Link Ads and some other services, but I have no idea what to pick. I've cruised Digital Point Forums and other sites, but those sites are full of hucksters. I've Googled, but I mostly pull up services and affiliates and the like.

I do have the capacity to build something custom (husband is software engineer), but I'd be okay if there's something already out there. I'm willing to consider text links and banner ads -- and, yes, I'd be willing to scale back a bit on the Adsense ads. If I'm not using a service that explains pricing, I could probably use some information on pricing.

Thanks!

posted by acoutu to Technology (8 answers total)

If you're willing to run your own advertising program on your site, I've had success with PhpAdsNew, an open-source package. The current/successor versions have been renamed OpenAds.
posted by Robert Angelo at 5:32 PM on March 29, 2007

We like using Adify. They've been very responsive. We were managing our own ads for awhile when manufacturers contacted us and it too time consuming. Adify has different rates for advertisers that you bring to the table and advertisers that they bring to the table.
posted by jeanmari at 5:32 PM on March 29, 2007

I give you this advice as a former professional ad trafficker. You may want to find out whether the advertiser is already planning to serve the ads from a third-party server, like DFA or Atlas. If so, and if you're only going to run one campaign at a time, it might be easiest to just get the ad-calling code from the advertiser, and hardcode it directly into your site.

Make sure to tell them that you'll need a login to the ad server so that you can track the campaign (they'll give it to you without an argument; that's how the business works).

Using your own ad server means that you will almost certainly get different reporting from the advertiser, i.e. it will look to you like about 20% more impressions were delivered than actually were. Unless you're planning on running a lot of campaigns from different advertisers at the same time, you're better off just putting the code directly on your site.

Feel free to email me.
posted by bingo at 5:44 PM on March 29, 2007

I've been considering text-link-ads.com, which is text-ads but is not context sensitive. However, since I'm doing pretty well on AdSense these days, I haven't had much impetus to change. Not sure if that helps, but hopefully so.
posted by Kickstart70 at 5:44 PM on March 29, 2007

With Text-Link-Ads, you have to have a certain amount of traffic first... not sure what the threshold is.
posted by IndigoRain at 6:49 PM on March 29, 2007

Response by poster: Text Link Ads offered me a per-ad price that was lower than I probably make off each Adsense spot right now.
posted by acoutu at 7:06 PM on March 29, 2007

I use phpAdsNew (or OpenAds now), Text-link-ads, and AdSense -- you can happily mix them all, and i find that diversifying is best for keeping your income stable.

Here's my general practice, which may or may not be helpful:

When i don't have any private ads (with OpenAds), i run Google ads in their slots. For my private ads, I have an ad information sheet with my advertising policies, screenshots of placements, and of course prices. When people enquire about advertising, they get the information sheet and can go from there. You might also want to run a survey on your blog to collect some demographic information for your info sheet.

I run text-link-ads along the side just as a stable little earner, and it's not directly linked to my other advertising.

You're more than welcome to drop me a line with any specific questions - my email is in my profile.
posted by ukdanae at 1:47 AM on March 30, 2007

Response by poster: Thanks, everyone. I may follow up with those who encouraged me to do so.

Have any of you come across a guideline for pricing ads? (I asked this in the OP.)
posted by acoutu at 9:15 AM on March 30, 2007