Banner Exchanges Unmasked

Multiple Banner Sizes

Another feature that’s as tricky as it is useful. The trick is that it is almost impossible to balance a network that operates with multiple banner sizes.

Once again, let's consider a very simple example. Imagine we have three sites and three banner sizes (large, medium, and small). The first site shows only small banners, but wants to advertise with large ones. The second site opts for medium banners on its pages. The third site offers space for large ads, but wants to run a campaign using medium sized ads. Is it possible to run such a network smoothly?

Actually, there are 2 types of multi-size networks:

1. truly multi-size, like the one described above (which can never guarantee smooth running of campaigns, nor complete use of ad spaces)

2. pseudo-multi-size (which is actually a number of separate networks united under the same brand with the interchange of impression credits between the networks)

The latter is a much more balanced network, because the possibility for members to use conversion rates for credit transfer between different banner sizes gives the network administration an added degree of control. On the other hand, when considering participation in such a network, Webmasters should evaluate each of the sub-networks separately, unless they are ready to accept numerous similar plug banners on their pages, or face problems when carrying out their own campaigns.

Thus, size doesn’t matter. What matters is how you use it. Or, more specifically, what matters is how they let you use it. It’s no secret that Web surfers are always evolving, which is why those "hit the monkey" campaigns work no more. Internet advertising has changed. Graphic banners can still perform well …if we're talking brand awareness. However, if you need to build recurring traffic, you might want to enhance your online ad campaign with capabilities offered by other media.

Now, the banner exchange site might make all manner of claims about supported ad sizes and formats, but if you want to be sure, look at the network’s HTML code. If it is nothing other than <a href src=> and <image src=> tags, the network is limited to simple graphics -- whatever the site or support team might claim. If the HTML contains the iframe tag, then take a closer look The iframe tag is supported by almost all major browsers and gives you two substantial advantages:

1. it lets you use advanced media types (frequently referred to as "rich-media") including HTML, Flash, javascript, cgi forms and more

2. your page loads before the content of iframe. So, even if your ad server is inaccessible to a particular visitor, it will not hamper their ad surfing

There’s an added benefit as well. Often, the Google bot indexes sites it finds via another site’s iframe. This may not be the case with every site, but it happens nevertheless.

Additionally, you should look carefully at the number of banners allowed by an exchange network -- the lower the number, the more trouble you'll have running your campaigns. The reason for this is very simple. For the sake of the exchange’s quality, each banner must be moderated. If, in order to run a new banner, you're forced to replace an old one, your campaign will suffer from being stopped (or slowed down) until the new ad is approved. The higher the number of banners that are allowed simultaneously, the lesser the impact that any ad moderation delays will have. Only the allowance of an unlimited (or almost unlimited) number of banners per campaign will grant you the flexibility to avoid the ill-effects of potential delays in moderation.

Detailed Statistics

This one is plain and simple:

• The more statistic an exchange provides, and the longer these stats are available to members, the more it costs the network in terms of storage space (for the stats archive) and operating memory (for the presentation of real-time data). This should be taken into account in your evaluation of the network’s ability to deliver the exchange rate promised.
• A greater number of targeting options granted by the network means more stats for member sites. As such, the availability of statistics should be evaluated against the targeting options available.

Fast Loading of Ads

The main factor that contributes to overall ad loading time is the process by which ads are chosen. There are other factors as well, but generally these are beyond control of exchange creators.

There are two ways to speed up ad choice processing.

The first is pre-calculation. Here, the system knows what banner is to be shown to a particular visitor long before he opens the page. In terms of speed, it's fine. In terms of flexibility, however, such an approach hits the exchange member badly. Advertisers can only stop or alter a particular campaign after all the pre-calculated impressions have been displayed, which means the delays in your requests can last from several hours, to a day -- or even more.

The second option allows real time management of ads, but places tremendous demands upon exchange creators. Why? Because this option requires:

• Fine-tuning of the OS kernel to adapt it to the real-time processing of multiple (and I mean tens of thousands of) connections that are served at the same time.
• A specialized Web-server that doesn't fork to process requests and can support many thousands of processes simultaneously.
• Custom-written databases, especially tailored to serve huge numbers of requests quickly, with flawless replication and scalability options far beyond those provided by general MySQL.
• Very specific hosting conditions (more often than not, including a separate data center with several servers for optimal scalability).

Conclusion

The aim of this article was to provide you with a tool to evaluate your future in a particular exchange network against the promotional statements and marketing promises that appear on the network’s site.

To simplify the task further, a brief evaluation of several exchange networks is presented overleaf.