Use Google to serve your own ads
by Andrew on 13/03/08 at 9:48 pm
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Google is currently beta testing a new ad-serving platform that will help website owners manage advertisers efficiently.
You define the areas on your site that you want to display ads, then you load up your advertisers and their banners/videos/text ads, and the Google Ad manager “serves” the ads according to the amount of inventory that the advertisers paid for. There are various proprietry, opensource and outsourced systems that do the same thing; we use OpenX (formally OpenAds) on Ideate after seeing that Keo.co.za was using this opensource system. It’s fairly powerful, but not the easiest thing to set up. I bet that Google’s offering is going to be dead easy to use. When it comes to their bread and butter (advertising related systems), they put a lot of muscle into getting it right.
So what’s in it for Google? Well, they obviously want website owners to display Google ads (via Adsense), and it will be dead easy to do this via their Ad Manager. It will be an easy sale to tell a publisher, “Hey, we see you’re only getting $1 for that ad. We’ll give you $1.50.” This will be a built-in feature of their system under the title of “Yield Optimization”. Eventually you’ll give up trying to sell ads directly to advertisers, and you’ll just go with Google’s Adsense. Caaa-ching to Larry and Sergey.
The great lesson that I take from Google’s example is that generosity is a valid sales tactic. Giving something of genuine value away for free looks risky, but in today’s world it’s a requirement in order to get noticed above your competition. Customers can spot a fake deal from a mile away (“Free! Win! Guaranteed!”), and they’re not going to switch from their comfort zone unless your offer is seriously appealing. In the good old days you had an advertising budget to blast at your market to get them to come over to your side. That doesn’t work anymore, and it’s best to start allocating a serious percentage of your revenue to providing something remarkable to your future fan-base. (Read about one such strategy here.)
Andrew Smith is the pedantic systems guy behind Live Alchemy, a SA e-commerce company. Andrew writes for Ideate in an attempt to make the world a more efficient place. View more articles by Andrew.
