One way to display ads on your WordPress powered site is to load up a text based widget with all of the HTML necessary to display 125X125 pixel banner ads. However, this can be cumbersome and a pain to manage. A WordPress plugin called Show125 helps take the pain out of displaying ads.

Show125 gives you granular control over your ads. Some of the features included in this plugin are:

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According to an article in the NY Times, Google is finally taking steps to use some of the massive amounts of data it's collected on users online behaviour to serve up ads. Instead of relying on data that is a few days or perhaps a month old, Google is now stepping it up a notch by serving ads which are relevant to the last 3-5 search queries a user has submitted.

For example, if I performed a Google search for "Caribbean", then 5 minutes later, performed a search for "scuba gear" Google would begin to display ads related to vacations in the Caribbean or for scuba diving equipment. Cookies need not apply here as the browser usually contains data related to previous search queries as well as previously browsed websites during it's session which is the data Google is tapping into.

This is certainly one way of showing relevant ads, but its kind of creepy if you ask me. It's only a matter of time before we go to Google.com, begin typing a search string into Google and in real-time, advertising pops up based on keywords and the entire search string.

What do you folks think about this experimental new way of advertising? I don't use Google Adsense so I'd like to know, does the technology Google use to increase its ad revenue trickle down into Adense and Adwords? If so, wouldn't this increase your revenue?

The advertisement page on your blog should serve two purposes: it should attract any potential advertiser with relevant information like site statistics, and it should provide contact information, prices, and other related information.  For those of you with the do-it-yourself mentality, this guide will be right up your alley.

Attracting Advertisers

The first thing that you should consider doing is writing a summary of your site's functions for the first introductory paragraph.  If your site offers additional services -- more than what what would be obvious -- than this is a great opportunity to inform advertisers of them.  This is also great for quickly informing advertisers that are scouring the web for opportunities and do not feel like investigating deep into your entire site.  In the end, it is a way to give your site a professional review.

While constructing your advertising page, your goal should be to highlight everything that is great about your blog.  This means using statistics to your advantage.  Impressive daily, weekly, or monthly visitor statistics are always something to highlight.  However, never mention statistics or information that would make your blog appear less worthy to an advertiser.

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If you're a web code expert (or even novice) you can probably handle hard coding in sponsored links in your blog's sidebar. But many people are unaware that you can manage text ads via your WordPress administration panel. It's a small tweak/hack, but once you have it in place, adding and removing sponsored text ads will be a breeze from then on.

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Advertisements are a vital (and often the most vital) part of a problogger’s monetization strategies. Thus, the choice of which type of ads to serve on one’s blogs is always an important question. You might be interested in the results of a study conducted by McCoy, Everard, Polak, and Galletta that appeared in the article The Effects of Online Advertising (Communications of the ACM March 2007). Yeah I know, it’s May already – the copy arrived a month late ;-)

The paper presents nothing new or radical; rather, it somewhat ‘formalizes’ what many web surfers have known/felt for long:

• Intrusiveness: Pop-under ads are the most intrusive type of ads, closely followed by pop-ups; inline (often banner) ads are considerably less intrusive than the two
• Return visits: More site visitors intend to revisit sites with inline ads than those with pop-unders and pop-ups (which are slightly worse than the pop-unders)
• Content retention: Visitors exposed to inline ads remember more of the site’s content rather than those exposed to pop-ups and pop-unders.

Unfortunately, I can’t quote exact figures or an excerpt, as to republish part of the work requires prior permission and/or a fee. Suffice it to say, the figures for pop-up and pop-under ads are neck to neck; the article seems to suggest inline (e.g. banner) ads are the most user-friendly among the three.

(For those interested in dissecting the paper more, access to the magazine’s online version requires ACM membership.)