The easy way to sell ad space on your website

Mark Newton Read more August 8, 2012

The simplest way to get advertising on your website is to join an affiliate programme. These are run by companies that aim to put advertisers (them) in touch with publishers (you), usually via a semi-automated website on which you select companies you think will want to advertise on your site. See also: How to use Google Analytics.

The easy way to sell ad space on your website

Your request is forwarded to the company in question, which can then either approve your site for its ads or not.

If approved, you can choose which of its ads suit your site, and the necessary code will be supplied for you to paste into your site. The affiliate company also provides a reporting website, where you can check how your adverts are doing and whether they’ve earned you any money.

Many of these advertisers have moved away from pay-per-click scenarios to a commission paid on actual web sales, which obviously suits them far better.

It isn’t so good for you, however: the most important thing for many such businesses is building a brand, and you’re effectively helping them do this for free with such a payment scheme.

The most important thing for many such businesses is building a brand, and you’re effectively helping them do this for free with such a payment scheme

If you’re happy with a commission scheme, though, there are plenty of advertisers to choose from – many affiliate companies offer this form of advertising, LinkShare being one of the biggest. Google has recently launched its own affiliate programme in the UK.

Which advertisers to choose is often a matter of guessing which will best fit your visitor profile, then trying them out. Google can help, since it provides extensive stats on each of its advertisers at the DoubleClick Ad Planner site.

You’ll find a lot of demographic information on visitors to many sites: take a look at the PC Pro site’s entry for an example of what sort of information is gathered, which includes everything from age, education and income to hobbies and interests – all useful to a prospective advertiser or publisher.

There was a serious worry that after 26 May 2012 much of this data would no longer be collected from any site with a UK presence, because new privacy laws came into effect that prohibit the placing of “non-essential cookies” without the user’s express permission.

However, it now seems that web analytics cookies will be permitted, so quite what cookies are banned on the basis of privacy is difficult to imagine. Obviously, all this information is anonymised so that facts about any particular individual can’t be discovered from the site, but it’s most useful for gaining an idea of which types of user access the site and so might be interested in your adverts.

Feeling rejected

Once you’ve selected a range of companies whose ads might be a good fit for your site and its visitors, you need to sit back and wait for the rejections to come in.

The companies have to agree to have their ads put onto your site, and they employ a variety of criteria, which aren’t always made clear; don’t expect to be able to host just anyone’s adverts.
Don’t be disappointed if you get a lot of rejections at first: we’ve found that once you start hosting some adverts then other advertisers will jump onboard and sign up. If a company rejects you at first, try reapplying after a month or so.

One reason for a refusal may be that the company involved can’t find the traffic stats for your site, for which purpose it may have been looking at Alexa, Google Trends or the Google Ad Planner mentioned above. Sometimes supplying them with your own web page stats can help their decision-making process.

If you’ve built your site using a content management system (CMS), most of them offer ad modules you can employ

When an advertiser does accept your site, it’s simply a matter of selecting which of their many ad formats will fit on your site, and then copying the supplied code and pasting it either directly into pages of your site, or into whichever advertising engine you’re running.

I currently use the excellent XIGLA banner engine on all our sites, since we use ASP and ASP.NET, but there are many others. If you’ve built your site using a content management system (CMS), most of them offer ad modules you can employ.

The reason for using such engines is that they let you designate zones on your pages where ads will appear, then decide exactly which adverts will appear, without having to recode the pages.

Such engines also allow you to rotate several adverts within each zone, so your visitors get to see a selection, hopefully increasing the chance they’ll click on at least one of them.

The advertising engine will also give you reports on how popular each advert is, as a clickthrough rate (which might differ from the stats that the affiliate site supplies, as they’re often only interested in clicks that convert into sales).

Once the adverts are in place on your site, you merely need to monitor their performance via the web interface supplied by the affiliate company. Keep in mind that while the advertising space on your site may be valuable real-estate, companies can be put off if you’re running too many ads, particularly if these are from very different industry sectors.

Making sure that the ads you’re running are generating revenue is very important, too, and using the big affiliate networks obviously isn’t the only route to generating revenue from website advertising.

I’ve often found that approaching the smaller specialist affiliates, or even the companies directly, can pay big rewards. One of our sites is about the card game bridge, and it regularly attracts enquiries from gambling companies, particularly poker sites.

These ads seem to be popular with the visitors to the site, and so hosting their adverts produces a good income flow without being too intrusive to our visitors. Good luck.