Ins and Outs of Displaying Banner Ads

WARNING: Look for signs of eyes glazing over due to the technical nature of this material. Antidote: Skip to the next article.

Functions of Ad Management Programs

If you want to generate income from banner ads on your site you'll soon need to have your webmaster install a banner serving program that will:

• Distribute banner ads to your pages, without having to continually change the HTML code of each individual webpage.
• Track banner views, click-throughs, and click-through rates.
• Provide online reports that advertisers can view real-time.
• Provide reports you can print out for invoicing purposes.
• Allow you to weight the amount of times a particular banner or set of banners is shown.
• Allow you to cut off the display of a banner after a certain number of views or click-throughs.
• Enable you to partition your site into different areas where banners are displayed independently of other areas.
• Prevent banners from being cached (delivered from memory) rather than being redelivered each time a new page is viewed. (This helps make banner view statistics more accurate.)

Rotating Randomly

Banner serving programs randomly "rotate" throughout your site banners from a pool of your advertisers' banners. If this weren't happening, the same visitor might see a particular banner time after time. When the banners are randomly rotating -- say you have six banners in equal rotation -- then the chances are only one out of six that a visitor will see the same banner on the next page he clicks on. This is good for advertisers since your site visitors won't automatically ignore the same banner. And it makes the page more interesting for the viewer, since something new keeps coming up.

Advantages of SSIs

Banner serving programs work best if your site is set up to allow Server Side Includes (SSIs). That way you can change the banner size, ALT tag underneath the banner, border width, etc. all from the banner serving program, rather than having to change the HTML code on each individual webpage. Using SSIs you can also deliver HTML banners or insert random HTML text into a webpage where you desire. Here's what a sample SSI call for a banner might look like on the original webpage:

By the time your visitor's web browser views the page, however, SSIs insert HTML code, such as:

SSIs can be tricky to master, and not all web hosting services allow you to use them, so banner serving programs typically allow a method that doesn't require SSIs. You specify a unique word or number on each webpage so the banner for this page will be delivered fresh and not from your computer's cache memory. In the example above you can see the number 10ca417a inserted into the HTML code to make it unique.

Do You Need a Banner Serving Program?

If you're serious about generating ad revenue on your site, you'll probably need a banner serving program, especially if you plan to sell ads yourself. If you're to be part of a banner network or banner exchange, on the other hand, you can serve banners on your site using the banner serving program on their site. (See the article in this issue on Banner Exchanges and Banner Networks.)

What Banner Serving Program Should I Purchase?

You can find some freeware banner programs, but don't expect much. Mark Welch's Adbility.com site gives links to programs and third party banner serving solutions that cost anywhere from free to $20,000 and up. http://www.adbility.com/wpag/ba_ad_sw.htm

In this issue we review two programs:

• Central Ad 4.0, a $595 program we once used at Wilson Internet Services
• WebAdverts 2.02, a $50 shareware program with a lot of functionality