Read Part 1 of my answer here, How to prepare your website for a paid advertising campaign. And here’s part 2.

Hi again Nicole.

I’m going to be right up front with you and tell you that I’m more than a bit biased against Google Adwords.
Now I know that there are lots of people out there who are having great success with Adwords. And I also know that in order to launch an effective adwords campaign you must either spend a LOT of time learning the system or hire someone good to do the work for you.

Either way you end up investing a lot more into your campaign. And that means that your potential return on investment (ROI) is immediately going down.

Google Adwords is not nearly as simple and easy as people seem to think. Unless you are in an extremely focused and highly targeted industry, If you simply bid on the popular keyword phrases for your business you will pay a lot of money and probably get visitors who are not targeted to your specific products and services.

Adwords pays off when you find hundreds – literally – of highly targeted keyword phrases that you can get for low bid amounts. That keyword research and inputting the data into Adwords can take a huge amount of time. Then you have to write great copy for your ads and get the campaigns set up. Then there’s the ongoing optimization to continuously improve the conversion rate of your campaign.

Unless you are willing to devote a major chunk of time learning how to effectively run an Adwords campaign or are willing to pay someone hundreds or thousands of dollars each month to manage your campaign, in most cases you will be throwing money away. (Which Google will not mind at all!)

Some people run short-term Adwords campaigns to test their landing pages. This can be an effective way to generate some short-term, targeted traffic to generate a statistically accurate testing sample. But again, unless you do it well, you will end up throwing money away on non-targeted traffic.

Bottom line for Adwords: If you’re planning on doing it yourself, set aside at least a full week to learn how to set up an effective campaign and get it started. Then plan on at least 3 hours each week to optimize your campaigns.

If you want to do it yourself, here are some adwords resources to check out:

The official Google Adwords Learning Center.

The official Adwords Blog.

Aaron Wall’s SEOBook blog, Free SEO Tools and Training Program

If you would rather not take the time to learn about Adwords – and put that time to better use creating more products and marketing materials – you can find qualified adwords experts at reasonable prices through services such as Elance.com and Guru.com. If you use one of these services, be sure to be very specific when you describe your project, check their credentials carefully, and speak with one or more of their existing clients.

Next week we’ll look at banner advertising.

Did you mean that I should pay for traffic after I do this even though my services aren’t ready? I expect a 6/1 launch date (I hope!), so do I wait or perhaps pay for some text ads on Google, now? A 125×125 ad here or there? What do you suggest?

Hi Nicole.

I’m going to make this a two-part answer. In this post, I’ll address the specific components you want to have in place on your site before you set up any type of paid advertising. Then, in part two, we’ll look at the pros and cons of Pay-per-click and banner advertising and explore when it makes sense to use them.

And since you have been bold enough to ask your question publicly, I’m going to use your site – www.picknicksbrain.com – as an example. I hope you don’t mind.

In an online marketing campaign, there are many variables. Some of those variables are within your control and some of them are not. In this post we’re going to look at the variables that are completely within your control: Namely, your website’s homepage, landing pages, subscriber sign up form, etc. Each of these components will be crucial in the success of your online marketing. And each of these factors is completely within your control.

As I mentioned in the previous post I recommend a two – or more – step process of converting prospects into customers. You can certainly attempt to convert new visitors into customers on their first visit, but experience and testing has shown that converting a new visitor to a subscriber first almost always leads to a higher customer conversion rate down the line.

Looking at your site, I see that you’ve added a Free Quick Guide to the sidebar. Great! That gives visitors an opportunity to join your list and get a valuable resource.

Now lets take a look at your offer and see if we can spruce it up a bit for the visitors who are going to be pouring in soon!

First, the offer itself gets lost on the page. There’s nothing to set it apart from the other links. I honestly didn’t even notice it the first time I went to your site. That’s not good!

This offer should be your primary focus. It should one of the first things – if not THE first thing – that your visitors see.

Use a different color. Use a larger font. Create a graphic. Experiment with different styles and then measure your conversion rate.

If you’re using Aweber for your email list, experiment with their excellent and easy to create pop-ups, hover and lightbox ads. In one test I ran, a static signup form converted at 7% and a lightbox signup form converted at 34%!

Second, consider changing the title of the offer. Instead of Free Quick Guide, which doesn’t tell me much about the product, consider using a title that focuses on the benefit your product offers. In this case it could be something like:

• Help Your Child Sleep Soundly – A Free Guide
• End Your Sleepless Nights… And Your Child’s – Get Your Free Guide Now!
• Sleep Like a Baby While Your Baby Sleeps Through the Night…

You get the idea. Zero in on the benefit your product provides and make that your title.

Next let’s look at your sign up form. When you’re converting a first time visitor to a subscriber always remember that Less is More! At this point in the process you don’t need to know their address and the number of children they have. Would it be nice to know? Of Course. But keep in mind that every extra field your visitor has to fill in decreases your conversion rate!

At this point in the process I would recommend you ask for their name and email address and that’s it!

And just as every extra field on your form means lost subscribers, every extra click also translates to lost subscribers. So put the entire form in your sidebar. Let people sign up right there. No need to click through to a sign up page.

And if you do it this way, you can use Aweber’s excellent split-testing feature to test different copy, colors, etc. You can even test the conversion rates on a form with name and email only versus one with name, email, address, and number of children. (You could discover that in your target market your conversion rate is higher when you ask for more info!)

Now what about your landing page?

If you are going to launch a paid advertising campaign you will definitely want a landing page devoted to your Free Quick Guide… er… The Secrets of Sleeping Babies Free Report!

You can use your existing sign up page, but flesh it out a bit. Start by changing the title as mentioned above. Then list some of the key things they will learn when they download the free report. Use bullets and focus on benefits. If you have testimonials include a couple of great ones here. If you don’t have testimonials, now would be a good time to ask for some!

You want to make this landing page as good as any sales page. This is your chance to get people into your system. If you don’t convert them now, they may not return. (But don’t worry too much; there are millions of others out there!)

So here’s your pre-paid-advertising checklist:

• Create a benefit-focused title for your free report
• Make your sign up form eye-catching
• Remove all extraneous fields from your sign up form (just name and email for now)
• Set up split tests with different types of sign up forms (hover, pop up, lightbox, etc)
• Create a landing page with bulleted benefits and testimonials

Once you’ve got those pieces in place it will be time to look at your paid advertising options. I’ll be posting part two of this answer later this week.

Thank you so much for any advice you might have on this subject.

Nicole – PickNicksBrain.com

Hi Nicole

First of all congratulations! You’ve got a great looking site with excellent information!

As far as advertising goes I would encourage you to hold off until you set up a system for capturing visitor emails. You want to immediately start to convert visitors into subscribers.

It’s great that you’ve got your blog set up for both RSS and Email subscriptions. But since you are focusing more of your attention on the business side of things you’ll also want to have a separate email list.

Keep in mind that a more effective and sustainable approach to online marketing is to take a long-term view. Your primary goal should NOT be to sell to visitors the first time they come to your site. That might make you money up front, but you’ll be losing out on the ongoing sales.

Instead, focus on providing great information (you’re already starting to do that) and encourage people to join your list with an incentive – a free report or recording of a teleclass for instance. My guess is that you already have some material that you could easily turn into a free report and offer as a sign up incentive.

These visitors who convert into subscribers are much more likely to become customers and, if you treat them right, they will very likely become customers for life!

That’s what you want.

Even when you begin advertising, I encourage you to think of it as a two-step process.

1. Convert visitors to subscribers.
2. Convert subscribers to customers.

On the technical side I recommend two email solutions:

If you want an integrated solution that includes a shopping cart, email and autoresponder management, and affiliate management you’ll want to go with 1ShoppingCart. I’ve been using it for over 3-years and it keeps getting better.

That said, the individual parts of an all-in-one solution will never be as good as a dedicated solution. So if you are just looking for a top-notch email and autoresponder system, I recommend Aweber. I am in the process of migrating my list from 1ShoppingCart to Aweber mainly for its higher email deliverability. But I am also enjoying the ease of use, the enhanced testing and tracking functions and their flexible blog subscriptions.

Whatever email service you choose, make sure it has – and you use – double or confirmed opt in for your list. Even though your list will be a bit smaller, it will be more responsive and more legal!

To your success!

Ed

I think nearly every internet marketing program out there promises riches, but honestly, I don’t think many of them focus enough on this very, very important part of your internet business. Massive amount traffic that doesn’t earn you any revenue isn’t going to keep you in business for very long. So I have reached out to several well-known marketers & bloggers for a 3-Question interview on the subject of getting visitors to covert into revenue.

First up is Darren Rowse of ProBlogger. Although Darren has a business model in which his revenue comes from a wide variety of sources, Darren is particularly talented at making money from CPC (Cost Per Click) ads, in which you earn revenue when a visitor converts into a click. So I the questions I asked Darren were specific to this kind of “conversion”.

Darren, you are well known for earning a six figure income from ads that pay if a visitor clicks on them. What are the different things you have done to test, change and improve your click-through ratio over the years on your sites, and what has worked the best?

The first lesson to learn is that every site/blog converts differently. For starters some ad types work well on one blog but not another but also the positioning and design of ads will work differently on different sites also.

The second lesson (with the first one in mind) is that you need to experiment and track your results. Try different designs/colors but also ad sizes and ad positions. You’ll be surprised what you find when you do. I run split tests on some of my blogs (A/B tests) and will run one ad unit with one color scheme 50% of the time and one with another color scheme the other 50% of the time. Do this for a day or two and you’ll see the difference. Then go with the better converting one and split test it with another style. You can do the same thing with the size of ads and positioning (and even between networks). It’s fiddly but it can be well worthwhile.

Some general principles to keep in mind:

Positioning – in general ads close to your content work best. Ads above the fold usually work best. Other key spots are anywhere that your reader naturally ’stops’ reading (ie at the end of an article).

Relevancy – you can have the prettiest and most well positioned ads in the world but if they are not relevant to your reader (and the content you’re writing about) then you’re unlikely to have them click it. This is why ‘contextual’ advertising works so well – it see’s you’ve just written about iPods and puts an ad up for iPods. If you’re using an ad network that isn’t contextual you’ll need to find ways to manually choose relevant ads.

Traffic - it’s obvious, but once your ads are well optimized you can have the most impact upon how much it earns by getting more traffic to it. However not all traffic is equal in terms of conversion. I’ve found that traffic from search engines can be quite good at getting clicks on ads like ‘AdSense’ ads while traffic from another blog with a good recommendation from the blogger can do better with affiliate programs. Traffic from regular readers is harder to convert with CPC ads so again affiliate programs can be better.

What are the factors that a publisher should take into consideration when choosing a CPC ad network (Chitika, AdSense, AdBrite, Kontera, etc.), and how can they find the one that is the best match for their niche?

Probably the main thing that I’d suggest is signing up for them all and testing. Like I said above – I find that they all will convert differently on different blogs. This is partly about the topic of your blog (ie a product related blog can do better with Chitika) but also about the type of reader you have (ie a blog with lots of loyal and regular readers can become blind to AdSense).

For me the main thing I look at is the topic of the blog and try to match it with an ad network that I know serves relevant ads.

If you were a blogger with an excellently written article/review with affiliate links in the post, how would you go about promoting that post?

Depends partly upon the blog and it’s current readership but I’d probably consider:

• Emailing a few key bloggers in the niche with the link
• Posting it to Twitter, Facebook etc
• Talking to a social media expert friend to see if it was worthy of them Digging it
• Adding it prominently to a sidebar/navigation bar on every page of the blog
• Writing a follow up post a few days later linking back to it

Most of the above is fairly basic – but together it can have an impact.

If you would like to request that I interview a particular person for this series, or want to be interviewed yourself, please email me with the details such as name, URL, and why you think this person (or you) would make a good addition to this series on Converting Visitors to Revenue.

But 2008 is going to be all about the ad network, and all I can say to that is that it’s about flipping time. Most emerging networks pay on a CPM basis – CPM stands for Cost Per Thousand impressions (where M stands for the Roman numeral of 1000, for added confusion). This means that publishers are paid a set amount of money for every 1000 times they display an ad on their website. The reason this is an important revenue model is that publishers are paid more consistently than when site visitors need to take an action like in CPA or CPC models. And sometimes, advertisers have either terrible landing pages, insufficient tracking systems, inappropriate ad creative or a clunky shopping cart, all of which are completely out of the publisher’s control and can foil the click, lead or sale.

In the last quarter of 2007, I saw more niche ad networks emerge than in the last two years combined. Ad networks like Casale Media, Tribal Fusion & Advertising.com have been around for a very long time. But they haven’t been a good revenue option for most bloggers for two main reasons :: they either pay very little, or they have high traffic minimums that 90% of bloggers can’t meet. Better options for bloggers started to appear in the last couple of years, like Federated Media & BlogAds, but they were still not available to all publishers regardless of the size of the blog audience.

Most of the ad networks out there now will make you sign some kind of legal agreement, and DO NOT SIGN or AGREE TO ANYTHING without reading it start to finish. There will likely be some tricky things that you need to be aware of if you will be running ads for someone else. Here are some of the things you need to know and look for:

1. Where do the ads need to be placed on my site? Most require that the ads need to be placed above the fold. And if so, your blog template needs to accommodate this requirement.
2. What ad sizes does the network use? Most run the most common sizes, which are 728×90, 300×250, and 160×600. You again need to ensure that your blog template can run these sizes, as not all templates can handle these sizes and still look good.
3. What other ads can I have on my site? Some require the exclusive right to all of your ad space. Some require exclusivity only on the portion of your pages above the fold. Some require that they are the highest ad spot on the page. And still others require that they be the only banner ads, but you can sell text ads. Be very clear about what they require, because the network could drop you if you don’t comply with the agreement on ad placement.
4. Can I still sell my own ads? This is an extension of the previous question, but like I said, some will require that you only work with them or that you cannot join any other ad networks, but can still sell ads directly to advertisers. Be sure you are clear on what you can and can’t sell on your own.
5. What else do I need to place on my site besides the ads to be a part of the network? Many networks will also require that you include some kind of badge or other text that promotes the rest of the network, as is the case with RealGirlsMedia, in our own sidebar. Usually this is included with the ad code, so there is no additional work for you to place it on your site. But you do need to take this into consideration when you make your decision, because it’s going to take up real estate on your page.
6. What is the average price they charge their advertisers? Competitive CPMs range from $10 to $30. From my experience, you can most frequently expect CPMs in the $12-$17 range. Some networks like BlogAds sell ads for a flat rate per week, month, or quarter. Some networks will allow you to set your own prices, which means that you need to know how much to charge to be both fair and competitive.
7. What is the revenue split? Networks will split this CPM with you, 50-50, 60-40, or sometimes 70-30. If you don’t like the CPMs they are charging and don’t like the revenue split, shop around.
8. What are their payment terms? Monthly? Quarterly? How long do they take to pay you? 15 days from the end of the month? 60 days? Can you get paid by PayPal? Or do they cut checks in the mail? Will they pay you no matter what, or is payment contingent upon the advertiser paying them, which means you have to wait for their billing cycle to finish before you will get your money?
9. What happens when they have no ads to run? This is especially important if they require some level of exclusivity, because if they have no ads, and you can’t run anyone else’s ads, you have a problem on your hands.
10. What kind of advertisers do they normally work with? While this may not be in the contract, you do want to ask this question, or look at their existing ads to determine what kind of ads you can expect to run on your site. If they have existing relationships with large, well established brands, this is a good sign.
11. Can I control which ads are shown on my site? Some networks allow you to accept or reject ads that come through their network. Others will simply give you what they have and you have to run them, no matter what. You also might not want flash or expanding ads on your site, so you need to know if you can opt out of these campaigns.
12. What is the term of the contract? 6 months, a year, 3 years?
13. Who will take credit for your ComScore rating? Many networks are requiring that bloggers sign over their traffic so that the network can look larger in their ComScore rating. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if you plan on growing your site to the point that you want to eventually sell all advertising directly to advertisers yourself, then you need to make sure that you can get that ComScore rating back when the contract ends. Otherwise, advertisers won’t be able to find you when you strike out on your own, because media agencies rely on ComScore to find and measure sites to buy advertising from.

New ad networks are appearing every day. And as the industry matures, terms for smaller publishers will get more competitive. Overall, this is great for the industry, as larger sites want to be able to sell more and more ads to their clients, and publishers gain access to higher earnings and better brands that otherwise wouldn’t work with such small sites.

So where do you find an ad network to join?

Remember, some have open enrollment, others are invitation only, and again, some have traffic or page view minimums that you must meet in order to join. Some act more like a rep firm, while others are extremely flexible. Check application instructions carefully to ensure you aren’t wasting your time in applying:

BlogHer

RealGirlsMedia

Federated Media

Adify (Which is a network of 30+ excellent niche networks, including Martha Stewart Living, Forbes.com the Washington Post Blogroll & Mom*Logic)

AdRoll (A more grassroots option that lets sites form their own networks)

Glam Media

BlogAds

Casale Media

24/7 Real Media

Advertising.com

Tribal Fusion

Burst Media

Gorilla Nation

Blue Lithium

Context Web

Quigo

ValueClick

And iMedia connection has a more extensive list of ad networks here

Got any other points to add? Any other hot networks out there to recommend? Or any other questions about ad networks for bloggers and small publishers? Share them in a comment!

Last week I talked about the different internet advertising models for making money from a blog: Affiliate Advertising, CPC Advertising and CPM Advertising. Let’s dive a little deeper into the details of affiliate advertising for bloggers.

Although you can put affiliate ads on your blog from day one, there are a few things that you need in order to make money from affiliate ads:

1. You need an audience (site traffic) that is interested in a specific topic
2. You need to select the right affiliate offer for site visitors
3. You need to present an affiliate ad in a way that compels your visitor to click on it
4. You need a tracking system in place to understand and analyze what converts into a sale with a merchant and what doesn’t

Step 1 :: Building a Targeted Audience

Although this is critical to the success of affiliate advertising, this basic step is important for all money-making strategies (and not just for blogging). You must have a specialized niche and topic for your blog that will draw a unique audience to your site.

This doesn’t mean that you can only write about one thing. Even though this is a home business blog, we’ve even gotten away with writing about Harry Potter, social networking for babies, and Nelson Mandela without ever straying off-topic – as long as you find a way to make a topic relevant to your audience, you can make it work (and never get bored writing!).

For more on building targeted traffic read:

An Introduction to Social Media Strategy and Socially Driven Content

My 8 Hours As A Blogging Socialite

Do You Have a Seasonal Search Engine Optimization Strategy?

Step 2 :: Selecting and Promoting the Right Affiliate Offers

I wish I had a magic one-size-fits-all answer as to how to know what is a great affiliate offer that will convert into a sale. But the only way to figure this out with your blog and your audience is to test, test, test. When I first started out, I thought that mail order home office products & furniture would be a natural fit with the site readers – I never made a penny off of the hours of work I put into building that dang affiliate store.

On the flip side, I also never would have thought that a measly $3 commission would ever add up to much. But I have found that this free local advertising listing offer from MerchantCircle.com has been a consistent revenue performer for all of my blogs for many months in a row, adding up nicely over the long haul.

For more on getting the right affiliate offer in front of the right visitor:

Affiliate Marketing Lessons Learned from Merchant Mistakes

How I Grew My Blogging Profits While My Traffic Numbers Went Down

Step 3 :: Ad Placement and Choosing the Right Ad Creative

While it is fairly easy to slap some banner code into your template, it’s not so easy to have that convert into an affiliate commission for your pocketbook.

Although I do have banner ads on my site, honestly the best way to get an affiliate ad to convert into a sale is within the text of your post. It’s especially important to “pre-sell” your reader on the product or service you are promoting. Reviews, testimonials, or how-to articles have been the best performing ways to promote affiliate offers. An example would be the recommended resources in Top 10 Internet Home Business Ideas You Can Start and Run in Your Underwear.

Generally speaking, text ads perform better than banner ads. But banners can and do work well, depending on your niche (the more tech-savvy your audience, the less likely they will click on a banner ad).

Other ways to promote affiliate ads, in order of best to worst performance:

1. Place a text ad within a post, but separate from the content such as this:
   
2. Place an ad between a post and your comment box. (Actually, I prefer to put Google AdSense ads here because the click-through justifies it).
3. Place an ad in one of these areas recommended by the Google AdSense heat map (the darker orange is the preferred placement spots):
   
   (Thanks to Beau for the reminder that Google has a different recommendation for blogs!)

For more on ad placement and advertising strategy:

Monetize Your Blog Like an A-Lister

Step 4 :: Track and Analyze!!!

The most valuable things I have gotten from blogging for a year and a half have come from the mistakes I have made. As I could see what didn’t work over time, I was able to adjust and change things to find out what did work.

As you build traffic, you can start analyzing the sources and understand what is the best place to promote your revenue-generating content. Social media traffic is fantastic for readership, page views, and SEO, yet is terrible for affiliate marketing.

Most affiliate networks will give you great stats in regards to how well your ads convert (from views –> to clicks –> to sales). Commission Junction gets my top award for the best analytics, which also offer trend graphs so that you can see your clicks, impressions, earnings, etc. over time.

For more on using analytics to optimize your affiliate advertising:

Increase Your Blog Revenue with Analytics :: Part I

Increase Your Blog Revenue with Analytics :: Part II

Recommended Resources

If you really want to learn affiliate marketing, there are two products that I recommend extremely highly – and put out by people who have made lots more money than I have at it. If you put into practice what these people teach, I guarantee you will make your money back and then some:

The Super Affiliate Handbook by Rosalind Gardner

I can’t recommend this book more highly. Rosalind lives her mission to help other affiliate marketers succeed, she’s one marketer you can trust for great advice and her book really delivers what it promises.

Affiliate Classroom

For a more hands-on learning experience, try the Affiliate Classroom. They have a full resource site, tutorials, case studies and an active community of affiliate marketers. And considering you can try it for $1 for the first two weeks, you really have no excuse to not give them a go.

Most of the regular readers of this site know quite a bit about making money from a blog – some of them more than I do. But when I talk to people outside of the blogosphere, the most common question I am asked is, “I don’t understand how you make money at blogging, how do you do it?”.

The short answer is: Advertising.

The long answer is: There are so many kinds of internet advertising and different programs & networks that a person new to blogging or web publishing can get rapidly overwhelmed with the idea of learning more about it.

A Breakdown of Major Internet Advertising Models for Blogs

Most advertising options open to publishers (bloggers) fall into three main categories:

Affiliate Advertising

These are text links and/or banners you add to your site, which pay the publisher if a sale is made on the merchant’s site.

Pro’s:
Even the newest of websites can get accepted into most affiliate programs run by merchants.

If an affiliate ad is targeted well to the site visitor’s interests, affiliate advertising can pay quite well.

Con’s:
It might take you a while to figure out how to target ads well. Until then, you will be basically running someone else’s ads for free.

You can’t control a shopper’s experience on someone else’s site, so you could work hard to send well-targeted visitors to a merchant’s site, only to have the sale fall through due to any number of ecommerce missteps they could make along the way.

Best resources to get affiliate advertising on your blog:

• Commission Junction
• LinkShare.com
• Shareasale.com
• Kolimbo
• Clickbank
• Azoogle
• Amazon Associates

CPC (Cost Per Click) Advertising

These are text links and/or banners you add to your site, which pay the publisher if a site visitor clicks on the ad.

Pro’s
CPC ads provide a bit more consistent income than affiliate ads.

You are paid simply for the fact that you sent a visitor to a merchant, whether or not the merchant makes any money.

Con’s
AdSense is the leading CPC advertiser, and ad-blindness is only getting worse.

Despite promises of AdSense riches, a very high percentage of publishers never make enough money from AdSense to justify a continuation of displaying their ads.

Best resources to get CPC advertising on your blog:

• AdSense
• Chitika

CPM (Cost Per Impression) or CPT (Cost Per Term) Advertising

These are banners you add to your site, which pay the publisher for every time the ad is viewed on a page, or for a set period of time (i.e., per month).

Pro’s
These ads are the most profitable, because the publisher will get paid as long as they continue to display the ads.

These ads provide the most reliable and stable income; nearly all major internet destination sites make their money from CPM advertising.

Con’s
You have to have a fairly established site and following in order to be an attractive option for advertisers. Benchmarks usually start around 500 unique visitors a day or 25K page views a month.

Most merchants won’t even look at a site under 1 million page views a month, which is quite out of the range of most blogs (including this one!).

Best resources to get CPM or CPT advertising on your blog:

• TextLinkAds
• Casale Media
• BurstMedia
• BlogAds
• BlogHerAds

Next week, we’ll start to discuss how to use these different advertising methods effectively on your blog. For now, I’ll leave you with a short list of commonly used internet advertising terms so that you can start understanding the terminology as you do more research.

Internet Advertising Glossary

Above the Fold
A phrase used to describe all of the information visible on a page without scrolling down.

Ad Network
A company that works with multiple advertisers and to match them with smaller publishers. They offer a great deal of value in connecting independent publishers with large companies. Usually they have built automated systems to make it easy for advertisers to screen potential ad placements, and for publishers to leverage a mass audience to connect with large income opportunities.

Ad Rotation
The process of rotating ads in a single spot on a web page. This can be tracked and adjusted to give more impressions to better performing or more important advertisers.

Ad Server
A software program installed on your hosting company’s web server that delivers, regulates, tracks and sometimes automatically optimizes advertisements on your site. They can also be set up so that advertisers can have access to their own statistics and can upload new ads on their own.

Creative
An ad industry slang term for the actual ad that is seen by a site visitor – used as a noun, rather than an adjective. “Can you send me the creative for this ad campaign?”, meaning the actual banner, or the text used in the ad.

CPM
Cost Per Impression – An advertiser pays a certain amount of money per 1000 ad impressions.

CPC
Cost Per Click – An advertiser pays a certain amount of money for every ad click.

CPA
Cost Per Acquisition or Action – An advertiser pays for every sale or lead that was generated from their web site. Also generally known as PPL (Pay Per Lead) and PPS (Pay Per Sale)

CR
Conversion Rate (or Ratio) – The difference between how many times an ad was clicked or viewed vs. how many times that click or view actually turned into a sale, a lead, or a desired action (like a subscription).

CTR
Click-Through Ratio – The difference between how many times an ad was viewed vs. how many times an ad was clicked.

Geotargeting
Serving ads to only a certain geographic area or population segment

Interstitial
This is a somewhat intrusive but highly effect ad format, in which a full page advertisement is loaded in between two pages of content.

PPC
Pay Per Click – Usually refers to search engine advertising, the sponsored links that appear when you do a search. These advertisers pay for each click they get.