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