Banners, Text Links and now Alert Bars!

I just found out about this new type of advertising offered by alertbar.com. They let publishers put html code that displays a small unintrusive bar at the top of the page with an ad. Since whenever a user has to move the mouse to the top of the page for any action (to type in the location field, for back button, stop button almost anything), the user mouse will be going over the alert bar. The color of the bar changes when the mouse is focused on it. So, as the mouse quickly moves over the bar, it sort of creates an alert effect and this may make many users to pause their action and take a note of the message (your ad) on the bar.

Their pricing is very low as well. Just $0.35 CPM. Yes, that’s right. It’s 35 cents for 1000 impressions. And a mere $300 for 2 million impressions! Check them out at alertbar.com.

Site-Targeted Advertising: The Chicken & Egg Problem

From what I know, AdBrite is one of the pioneers of Site-Targeted advertising and Google followed the suite. Ofcourse, AdBrite also had the network ads which Google had for a long time.

One of the problems for Publishers with Site-Targeted Advertising is, especially for those who have very little traffic (say, Alexa rank above 100k), is that unless there is advertising history, advertisers may not pick you. But to get the advertising history, you need to be picked. That’s why it’s a chicken and egg problem.

Now, AdBrite for example, also offers placing network ads in your ad zones. However, the number of advertisers picking such network ads may be less and even otherwise, most of those ads may not be relevant to your website. As a result, your click through ratio will be very bad and that only is going to prevent a potential advertiser from picking your ad zone for their advertising needs.

There seems to be a bunch of tactics that people are using on AdBrite for example. One is to sell their ad zone for very less price. Like less than 10 cents for a whole month! That won’t even cover the cost of hosting the website! Now my next concern is, what if the same website fictitiously start buying it’s own ad zone just to boost up the statistics like the click count and repurchase rates? In process, they are probably getting 50 to 75% of the money back as they will be getting paid for their own ads as a publisher!

Anyway, this is all just a bunch of thoughts from my scrutinize-anything-and-everything mind!

Ads & Affiliates

Should you use your web site realestate to display ads or display the affiliate programs? There is no one answer for this. It all depends on your audience. For most small websites with a traffic of about 100 page views, getting revenue either through advertisements or affiliate programs is not easy.

So, I would suggest try out both options. Infact, trying one option on one part of the page and a second option on another side of the page is also a good strategy. Changing the affiliate products periodically is another good idea.

How often should I change the strategy? I wouldn’t recommend changing the strategies atleast there is enough data sampling. Use a visits tracker like statcounter to get the data sampling. For very small websites, your initial focus for the first 6 months or so should be to build traffic. Don’t bother to sign up for ads from day 1. Infact, start with affiliate programs initially till you get your website atleast about 100 page views or so. Without much page visits, the advertising brokers like Google and AdBrite may not get you the best deal.

Yahoo! Search Marketing on Google’s AdSense!

Today I just saw a Google AdSense ad that read

Yahoo! Search Marketing
Save $50 on pay per click advertising with Yahoo! Sign up.
searchmarketing.yahoo.com

With all the build up that Yahoo! gave about Panama, their latest quarter was no different than earlier quarters and the stock tumbled quite a bit. If they are advertising using Google’s AdSense, what confidence will a potential advertiser have in going with Yahoo! for their search marketing?