If you're pursuing an advertising revenue strategy for your site, you will have done a lot of looking at competition websites to see what makes them good — and to determine how you can be even better.
Type and Size of Advertising. Is most of the advertizing in your industry Google text ads or display ads (that is, graphic ads)? If display ads are popular, what size appears most often?
As of February 28, 2016, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) lists seven standard ad units (dimensions in pixels are in parentheses):
- Medium Rectangle (300 x 250) Rectangle (180 x 150) Leaderboard (728 x 90) Skyscraper (160 x 600) Half Page Ad (300 x 600) Button 2 (120 x 60) Microbar (88 x 31)
One size that's shown as delisted is the Full Banner (468 x 60). You'll still see this widely on the Internet, but not on sites that are seeking to sell to advertisers that pay well. Sometimes you'll see other sizes, but for designing your own page, stick to the most popular sizes in your niche or industry.
Source of Advertising. Now look deeper to determine the source of advertising. Most third-party ads have two URLs.
Intermediate URL of the ad server. The adserver is the company that displays the ad as well as counting and collecting information on the click-through, then redirects the user's web browser to the… Destination URL on the landing page of the advertiser's website, where the Internet user is supposed to end up.
If you can figure out what the adserver company is, you can learn something about the advertising type. The intermediate URL can sometimes be seen by putting your cursor over the ad (without clicking) and looking for a URL at the bottom left of your web browser frame. However, some types of ad technologies don't disclose the intermediate URL — and it's hard to see in the URL in the bar at the top of your browser, since it redirects so fast. Another approach is to right-click to view source.
What you're looking for is the name of the adserving company (not the brand of the ad serving software). For example, DoubleClick (now owned by Google) is often used to display higher-priced ads on better sites. Ad networks, on the other hand, display lower-priced ads. You'll see some of the names of ad networks in step 7 below. The detective work you do here may pay off in useful intelligence to help you develop your own strategy.
