Being a Profitable Publisher

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For a Web publisher, the various elements that create a successful and profitable advertising strategy are complex and often confusing. Dozens of technology choices confront you, new advertising options appear on the market each month, and ever-changing trends make something that works well this year less effective the next.

When it comes to technology, publishers must not only choose among many vendors -- each of whom covers a certain portion of the overall ad strategy -- but must get these disparate in-house and third-party technologies to work together. Crafting an effective overall ad strategy is also difficult because it reaches across as many as four different groups within a publisher’s organization, including sales, operations and trafficking, content design and system administration. These groups may or may not communicate effectively, especially as the online media publication grows.

Newer publishers, whose sites have grown to the point where larger-scale advertising becomes feasible, typically jump into ad deployment in piecemeal fashion. They develop each different piece of a strategy as it is needed, but don't really develop a complete plan. They typically make technology and ad inventory choices haphazardly, without a grasp for how the details fit into the big picture.

Conversely, an experienced publisher -- whose staff believes itself to be savvy veterans of the industry -- may be overlooking critical aspects of the complete ad strategy, may be using outdated techniques, or may be taking certain ad revenue for granted without probing how it could be increased. Businesses that become complacent will often allow their ad strategy to stagnate amid a dynamic and evolving market. Only a continual analysis and revision of a publisher’s entire ad revenue model will bring improvement and, ultimately, more profits.

The keys to a successful ad serving deployment strategy are to maximize advertising inventory value and volume, minimize advertising operations and technology costs, and properly develop, market and sell the available ad inventory. The first two elements seem obvious: of course increased revenue and decreased cost will lead to higher profit. However, it takes a disciplined and well-thought-out combination of techniques to actually achieve these objectives.

We want to raise revenue and cut costs, but the means to do this aren’t necessarily obvious. Since increased ad sales and increased ad revenue are intricately tied together, most of the techniques used to increase revenue in ad serving will also change the way the ads are sold -- and will require a progressive and flexible sales team. Having stellar ad delivery volume, ad vehicles and ad value will not create much extra income if the inventory is ineffectively sold.

The basic keys to ad serving success can be further broken down into eight elements that comprise a complete ad serving deployment strategy:

Improve Web site presence, traffic and audience.
Use a full range of different advertising vehicles.
Increase the average value of advertising inventory.
Increase total percentage of sold inventory, especially value-added inventory.
Minimize the cost to purchase, setup, maintain and run the ad serving technology.
Utilize tools to create campaign effectiveness metrics.
Use remnant and unsold inventory effectively.
Optimize site content and ad layout design.
Adherence to an overarching advertising strategy should be part of the plan of any publisher. Those of us who enjoyed the Internet advertising euphoria before 2000 know quite well that ad revenue and profit margins cannot be taken for granted today. Attention to all the details and facets of publisher ad serving can be the difference between success and failure, regular paychecks and the welfare line.

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Step 1: Improve your presence and image to boost traffic (second of nine parts).
Last week, I introduced the idea that the keys to a successful ad serving deployment strategy are to maximize advertising inventory value and volume, minimize advertising operations and technology costs, and properly develop, market and sell the available ad inventory. I mentioned that it takes a disciplined and well-thought-out combination of techniques to actually achieve these objectives. Among those techniques: improve Web site presence, traffic and audience.

From a publisher's standpoint, advertising is an economy of scale. Per-unit ad serving costs tend to decrease and profits tend to increase with increased volume of ad delivery. As we will see later, it is not just overall profit that can be increased with a proper advertising strategy, but the ad profit margins themselves, using techniques to increase average ad inventory value.

Good Web site presence means you are making strides in driving new, more and better traffic to your site, you are increasing your standing and brand perception among your target audience, and you are getting your audience to stay longer and make repeat visits.

Improving a site's presence is one of the most effective and fundamental things you can do to improve the total ad inventory value and ability to generate revenue. This is mostly for two reasons: size and standing matter to advertisers who put their money more often and in larger amounts where there is robust traffic and large audience reach, and the perception of quality and a solid brand name assures an advertiser that the audience is also of similar quality.

Increase volume and reach

The first way to build site presence is by increasing volume and reach. Many ad buyers and advertisers will simply not consider sites unless they have achieved a certain volume of page views and a certain audience size. Typically this critical mass is reached when a site achieves a volume of more than five million page views per month and a base of at least 500,000 unique visitors per month. Volume is especially important to publishers who wish to segment their overall audience and sell these audience segments at higher value.

Reach is a metric that is loosely used to define the total raw number of unique visitors to a Web site, but is more accurately used to define a percentage of all unique visitors considered accessible to that Web site. The more volume and reach, the better.

The use of browser toolbars and their site rankings, such as those by Alexa and Google, has become popular with ad buyers as basic methods of measuring a site's volume and reach. The toolbar rankings are compiled by aggregating and extrapolating site browsing activity for the pool of viewers who have installed the toolbar. How accurate the toolbar rankings information is, however, is debatable since they only represent the activity of the group of visitors who are advanced enough to know about, and have a reason to, download and install the toolbar in the first place.

Nevertheless, these toolbar rankings are important to advertisers and serve to "set the bar" for a site's advertising desirability. Of course, there are more sophisticated services available to marketers that measure and analyze audience, which are offered by companies such as Nielsen and comScore, but these services are not free via a simple download.

Improve standing and brand recognition

A second way to build and define a site's presence is to improve its standing and brand recognition, both among the existing visitors and non-visitors who are a part of the overall target market. Advertisers like prestige and reputation, and the intrinsic ad inventory value of a publisher's site increases if it can become regarded as a high-profile, trusted brand.

Just like a Donald Trump real estate property commands higher rents, so will a Web site which is viewed as prestigious and high-quality. High standing in the online media world requires high-quality content that is useful, well organized and well designed.

Boost retention and loyalty

The third way to build site presence is to improve visitor retention and loyalty in order to create longer visits with more page views and repeat visits. For example, a site that offers a way for visitors to sign up for and receive a periodic newsletter will do better in bringing those visitors back and achieving their loyalty. Another example is mechanically increasing a visitors' average page views by allowing them to format the page's content in a printable form, or by linking the visitor to other related content on the site.

Boosting your site's presence brings you more advertising inventory for a site sell and the opportunity to sell that advertising for more. Of course, driving and building raw traffic, page views and unique visitors -- i.e. volume and reach -- does not come without cost. Nor does building standing and brand recognition. Size and quality matters, because they are what command advertising dollars.

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Use a full range of different advertising vehicles (third of nine parts).
We saw last time that building traffic and audience is an important aspect of building ad revenue. Another is selecting the proper advertising vehicles. Using a full range of them will produce a robust variety of revenue earning tools and can generate revenue from places that may have been previously untapped.

An advertising vehicle is a segment of a site’s advertising inventory that has a unique display location, and which is sold and reported separately from other advertising not belonging to the same revenue vehicle. All of the ad vehicles that are used by a site comprise that site’s total ad inventory. The revenue from all of the ad vehicles comprises the total advertising revenue. Different vehicles can be combined to form one sales package, but they still are separate entities and must be broken out separately for reporting. Different vehicles do not overlap nor compete with each other.

A site needs to analyze the different advertising vehicles available to them, determine which ones would be feasible to implement and sell, and determine which ones would be profitable based on a cost and revenue analysis. An advertising vehicle might look attractive and be sellable but may also be expensive to implement and manage.

The basic ad vehicles available to Web publishers are:

Graphic ad banners
Text ads
Page content hyperlinks
Interstitial and prestitial ads
Pop-up and pop-under ads
Email ads
Special types of rich media
Graphic ad banners are the areas of Web pages allocated to showing graphic ad units of various pre-determined sizes. The ad inventory for one vehicle cannot, by definition, overlap that of another vehicle. So a skyscraper (120x600) and a leaderboard (728x90) are just sub-parts of the same vehicle -- the graphic ad banner. They are not two different vehicles. Likewise, rich media ads, like a Flash banner or a banner with HTML elements, are not distinct ad vehicles. They are part of the graphic banner ad vehicle. All of these subsets of the same ad vehicle compete for delivery to the same defined locations.

The text ad vehicle is the area of Web pages which is allocated for formatted advertising text. Text ads do not include text-based, contextual advertising such as Google AdSense, which is delivered in banner format into existing graphical ad banner space. An advertising vehicle does not build value -- it defines the site’s total inventory framework. Note also that search-term targeting is a value added subset of the basic text ad vehicle but it does not comprise its own unique location and is not a new vehicle.

An interstitial is an ad vehicle which is delivered in between page views. A prestitial is served to a viewer prior to initial entry into the site, before the Web site itself is displayed. Prestitials and interstitials are typically full-page ads and are shown within the same browser window that is being used to view the site.

The pop-up and pop-under ad vehicles are similar to an interstitial, except that they may or may not be displayed between pages, and will appear in a new browser window that is opened specifically to display the advertisement. Note that pop-ups, pop-unders, interstitials and prestitials are especially dependent on tight frequency capping so visitors do not leave the site in annoyance -- and so that the ad vehicles maintain their value to advertisers.

Page content hyperlink ads are actual page text which has been selected, highlighted and transformed into hyperlinks to an advertiser’s page. Enabling page content hyperlinks requires an ad serving technology that can dynamically scan a page’s content to pick out keywords and phrases, and then set up the inline page links for advertisers who have purchased those keywords. Essentially, page content hyperlinks are a dynamic form of contextual advertising, but they are a distinct advertising vehicle.

Email ads are text or graphical ads served into an HTML email. Many Web sites have built up large lists of email addresses that have been submitted by site viewers who wish to receive periodic newsletters, site updates, etc. A Web site should leverage this voluntary audience by selling advertising within the scheduled email deliveries. Generating revenue from opt-in email advertising is typically only feasible for sites that have the resources to both generate a large email recipient base and create useful and interesting content to give to the subscriber. These are not easy tasks.

Rich media describes a wide array of technology-driven advertisements. Some rich media types raise the value of an ad vehicle’s inventory and some rich media types actually define a new ad vehicle by creating a distinct form of advertising that exists in its own location. Rich media ad vehicles include ad banners that fill empty browser margins, in-page ads (floaters, takeovers or backgrounds), cursor ads and audio ads.

All ad vehicles have costs, including the cost to implement and deploy the vehicle, the cost to sell the new inventory and potential site clutter -- or negative experience costs imposed on the visitor. The key for publishers is to utilize all of the practical and feasible ad vehicles available to them, always keeping in mind return on investment.

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Increase the average value of advertising inventory (fourth of nine parts).
We saw in previous parts of this series that important aspects of building ad revenue is growing site presence and the proper selection of advertising vehicles. Neither of these pursuits, however, makes the biggest difference in the publisher's advertising bottom line.

It is the inherent value of your advertising vehicles -- collectively, the ad inventory -- and the ability to sell that value-added inventory that can really boost profit margins. The general value of advertising inventory is set by the market, but a publisher can use various methods to increase their inventory value to levels that are well above this market price.

Many publishers speak of the "80/20" rule, whereby 80 percent of revenue is generated by 20 percent of inventory. Three main categories of ad inventory value building are:

Audience segmentation and targeting.
The ability to easily traffic and report on any type of rich media.
Optimization of graphical banner layout and ad unit size.
The first way to build inventory value is technology-driven audience segmentation and targeting. More focused targeting makes the inventory more attractive and valuable to advertisers because you are accurately defining the audience to whom their ads will be shown based on something that is known about the users, what those users are looking at or what those users are looking for. When a publisher has the tools to create and sell audience segments and place the right ads in front of the right people, the baseline value -- or the average effective CPM value -- for each ad vehicle will increase.

Regardless of the skill of the salesperson, if they are peddling inherently lower-value inventory, the revenue that is generated will also be lower. Of course, when segmenting your audience, high traffic and ad impression volume is important because the more finely you define the audience, the larger the total user pool you need to come up with enough sellable inventory.

Topic-driven focus

The most basic inventory segmentation is done by establishing sections of a publisher's site which fall into related topics or within distinct areas of interest. For example, some sites could have pages that contain information about various different geographic areas or have pages that are international, national or regional in focus.

Another common segmentation practice is to break down a site by specific content categories such as sports, weather, technology, real estate, shopping, travel, etc. This targeting by topic or geographic location of interest to the viewer can then be a higher-value advertising campaign opportunity. Try to be innovative and creative when forming a site's targetable content categories.

Search term targeting

A second type of inventory segmentation is the use of ad server technology which provides targeting based on a visitor's stated interest (search term keyword) or the actual page content at which the visitor is looking (contextual keyword). Search term keyword targeting is ad delivery based on a term or phrase that a visitor submitted in a search for information. Search term targeted ads are attractive because the ads are relevant to something the visitor is trying to find.

Most publishers do not nearly have the search term entry volume to enable their own in-house sales of search terms, so they utilize keyword ad networks. This approach is very effective because a site can easily use these networks to tap into a large pool of advertisers who are buying keywords that would be otherwise unavailable to the publisher. Search term targeted ads can either be displayed as "Sponsored Results", which are text-based advertisements appearing within the search results text, or as graphical banners shown in the graphical ad banner inventory space on the search term results page.

Targeting in context

Contextual keyword targeting is ad delivery based on the text content of the page. This type of keyword targeting works in essentially the same manner as search term keyword targeting, except that the keyword is derived from the page text itself and not from a visitor's stated desire. Keyword lists for contextual targeting can either be generated by "pre-indexing" the site content, or by using ad serving technology which can dynamically analyze the text on each page as the page is built.

Contextually-targeted ads are attractive because the ads are relevant to the content on the site's pages. Like search term targeted ads, contextually targeted ads can appear as text-based ads or as banners within the graphical banner ad space. One advantage of using dynamic contextual targeting is that it can allow a publisher to enable an entirely new ad vehicle called "in-text" ads, where actual text within the page's content is transformed into hyperlinks to an advertiser's page. Typically both search term and contextual keyword campaigns are sold on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis.

Person, place or action

A final type of inventory segmentation is the use of ad server technology that provides targeting based on visitor attributes such as geographic location, demographic profile, and behavior. Geographic targeting is the delivery of advertisements to a visitor based on the actual location of that visitor. Visitor demographic profile targeting is the delivery of ads based on known user attributes that have been voluntarily given to the publisher by the visitor such as age, gender and income.

To target to a visitor profile you will need to have an information collection strategy in place and the technology required to set profile cookies and deliver ads based on the cookie contents. Behavioral targeting is serving ads based on the actions a user has previously taken on the site. Obviously, a large and loyal audience is essential to the implementation of behavioral targeting.

Make it rich

Besides audience segmentation, another way of building inventory value is to make it easy for advertisers to run more engaging ads such as rich media. Rich media is valuable because it has been shown to evoke more response from viewers. Rich media is loosely defined as coding or proprietary technologies which produce ads that are more engaging or which can allow for user interactivity. Some examples of value-building rich media are Flash ads, HTML ads, video, expandable banners, floating banners, DHMTL ads and cursor ads.

Rich media should be used with discretion so that it maintains its effectiveness without detracting from user experience, site usability or site performance. This can be accomplished using frequency capping in conjunction with prudent scheduling.

An especially good way to easily sell lots of rich media campaigns to advertisers is to make a third party rich media creation tool available to them which simplifies and reduces the time to create and set up any type of rich media. A publisher who can offer this tool has the potential to sell more high-value rich media campaigns because the advertiser's costs and development effort associated with rich media is drastically reduced.

Supersize and optimize

The final way to build ad inventory value which doesn't require audience segmentation is by optimizing graphic banner layout and ad unit size. For example, it is advantageous to use a small selection of large-sized ad units which are commonly sold and which command the highest average value, namely the 160x600 skyscraper, the 728x90 leaderboard and the 300x250 medium rectangle. These larger ad units have higher inherent value and they increase the number of potential advertisers who can run banners on the site and ensure that a publisher has the ad unit sizes for which the majority of higher value rich media is designed. In part eight, we will look more closely at optimizing site content and graphical ad layout design.

风清扬

看这些E文实在眼晕， 大坏蛋你不能发中文？

大坏蛋

我也想发阿  可惜大部分比较权威的资料都是英文的 谁叫互联网是老外发明的
E文其实也不是很难看 看多了习惯就行了饿
找金山词霸带着看