Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Ads on school websites: Forms of ads

With budget stress for schools, many are looking for new sources of revenue. Website advertising is an option. There are lots of ways to advertise on school websites like ours if you choose to do so.

Forms of ads

Do you want to find advertisers yourself or use ads from a broker?

Broker ads: Google AdSense
By far, the easiest way to start advertising on a website is to include ads from a broker like Google. They have lots of advertisers and will match the search terms they have bid for with the content of the page where the ads appear in order to select ads relevant to the readers of that page. As an example, I have created an AdSense account to embed ads on this blog post. It took about two minutes to fill out the form on the Google site. They then do some sort of verification on you and then send the instructions for embedding the block of ads. You paste them into the HTML code for your page and then wait for the ad revenue checks to roll in. Couldn't be easier.

Finding your own advertisers
Another approach that is far more difficult but which gives you greater control over what ads appear is to find your own advertisers and serve them yourself. Here's what's entailed:

• Determine what sort of ad you're selling. Is it a short text ad like those that appear on the Google search results? Is it a banner ad in which you define a rectangular area of fixed dimensions which the advertiser can fill however he chooses?
• Are you selling time, exposures or click-throughs? If selling time, you agree to display the advertiser's ad for a fixed number of days. If you're selling exposures, you're selling the promise that your ad will continue to appear until the page it is on has been viewed by a predetermined number of website visitors. If you're selling click-throughs, the advertiser is only charged when a website visitor clicks on the ad. Depending on how you're selling your ads, you must keep track of whether you're fulfilling your side of the bargain. Selling time is the easiest to track, followed by selling exposures and selling click-throughs is the most difficult to track. So why go to the trouble of selling click-throughs? It is usually the most attractive to advertisers because they don't have to pay anything unless a person clicks to visit their website.
• Next, you have to sell ad space to advertisers, possibly help them to create ads and then run the ads.
• Finally, advertisers are typically going to be interested in the demographics of your audience and statistics about their ad exposures.

Finding your own advertisers and managing ad serving (meaning making the ad appear when and where it should) is obviously a lot of work.

Sponsors
Another approach is, rather than selling ads as such, you might sell the opportunity to sponsor a website or a portion of the website. In this case, instead of an ad you might have a statement in the footer of each page to the effect, "This website is sponsored by Fred's Pizza" with a link to the Fred's Pizza website. This is far easier to manage than selling regular ads but still more difficult than inserting ads from a broker.

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Keywords: ads, cost savings

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Ads on school websites: How to advertise

With budget stress for schools, many are looking for new sources of revenue. Website advertising is an option. There are lots of ways to advertise on school websites like ours if you choose to do so.

How to advertise

Ads can be intrusive and annoying or can be useful and beneficial. For example, popup splash screens, animated banner ads and unsolicited commercial emails (spam) are generally considered instrusive and annoying. They interrupt and distract one's attention. Typically they are thought to add little benefit to a website visitor. And spam email clogs our mail readers, wastes our resources, and is seldom viewed as beneficial.

On the other hand, sometimes we want to see ads. Consider the yellow pages: nothing but ads, but we find them useful because we go to the yellow pages (or did in the old days) when we want to find products and services. People get fashion magazines like Vogue for the ads. The ads communicate what the fashion leaders are doing. When you're looking to buy new tires, tire ads become fascinating. Ads are useful and beneficial when they present information that we want to know when we want to know it.

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Keywords: ads, cost savings

Monday, February 21, 2011

Ads on school websites: What to advertise

With budget stress for schools, many are looking for new sources of revenue. Website advertising is an option. There are lots of ways to advertise on school websites like ours if you choose to do so.

What to advertise: Think "useful"

Targeted advertising attempts to present only those ads to readers that are likely to be of interest to them. That's how the ads work Google. Two factors determine when and where Google ads will appear. First, advertisers bid on search terms. The bid is for how much the advertiser must pay if a user clicks on the ad link. He pays nothing if no one clicks. So, if an advertiser bids on the search term "football" and someone does a search for "football," his ad may appear along the border or above the search results. But where?

The second factor that determines where an ad will appear is the number of clicks it has attracted. Ads that get lots of clicks are considered to be the most useful to people searching for that search term, so Google places them closer to the top of the list. Those with fewer clicks are placed lower on the list or on later pages of search results. Google doesn't disclose exactly how the two factors, bid and click frequency, are combined to determine placement, but they use both.

The point is, like Google, it's best to think of advertising as a way to offer useful information to your website visitors. The alternative is to think you only serve the advertisers and any kind of disruptive or annoying junk they want to put on your page is fine as long as they pay the price. That attitude is a quick way to lose website visitors.

What might your school website visitors find useful?

• Educational material such as National Geographic, tutoring services, gymnastics schools, martial arts schools
• Colleges, summer schools, experience vacations
• Non-school organizations like Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts
• Counseling services
• Local businesses
• Vanity ads like the ones that many yearbooks include where parents congratulate their kid's accomplishments
• Personal ads

Posted at 8:47 AM (permalink) 3 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: ads, cost savings