We’ve all seen links on our favorite blogs that say something like “buy ads here” or “advertise here,” but unless you’re an advertiser, you may not have clicked to find out where that link takes you. If a blogger really wants to make money blogging, she will have a landing page full of compelling information and options for advertisers. And that’s at the very least.

Today, we’ll learn how to make a kick-ass advertising page by looking at advertiser pages that already kick ass.

Some key takeaways from the pages above:

1. The advertiser page matches your site. Sounds obvious, but make sure your own branding is on your “advertise here” page. Some ad services, such as Blogads.com, automatically provide this page, but it’s up to the blogger to dress it up.
2. What’s your blog all about? The “about us” page has been a staple of the Internet for years. While it may feel old fashioned to tell what your blog is about, a short blurb for the advertiser in a hurry will help him decide if your blog his right for his campaign.
3. Who reads you blog? Do you use a service like Quantcast? Do you conduct reader surveys? Any demographic information that you can provide an advertisers will let her know if your audience is the right group to target. And the more you know about your own readers, the better you can position your blog in front of the right advertisers.
4. Include testimonials. Has anyone ever said anything nice about your blog? Reader testimonials on your “advertise here” page will showcase your audience’s passion. Advertiser testimonials will showcase your previous advertisers’ success.
5. Placement examples. Believe it or not, Ad-Speak isn’t a required language for everyone who wants to buy or sell ads. Rather than just saying, “buy a banner!” or “check out the 250×300,” why not show what you’re selling with a mockup or placement guide?
6. Spotlight past and present advertisers. Giving a shoutout isn’t just good practice for attracting new business, it’s also a great way to earn repeat customers.

If you’re ready to make money blogging with Blogads.com, take a moment to fill out our publisher application.

And as always, let us know if you wanna chat via our handy form, or in the comments section below!

Welcome back to Digital Ad Academy, where no advertising term or concept is too mundane or obscure for our careful examination. Today we’re looking at ad units, and zones and adstrips. Though use of  these terms varies from amongst different online ad providers and networks, they are the most common words used to describe ads and their placement. If you understand what they mean, then it will be easier to get the quality ad impressions you expect as an advertiser — or set the prices you desire as a publisher.

Ad Unit
The ad unit is vessel that carries a brand’s message through publications, broadcasts or applications. Or, more simply, it is the ad itself.

This term can also be used to refer to the type of ad unit, such as a bilboard, TV commercial or interactive skin.

Some online publishers only sell advertising based on guidelines set by the International Advertising Bureau (IAB), to attract a broad spectrum of advertisers. More exclusive ad services and publishers, especially those in the social media realm, like Blogads.com and Facebook, have proprietary ad units that are not based on IAB standard, for which advertisers can create uniquely engaging ads.

For more information on how online ad units are priced and purchased, check out our overview of CPM, CPC and CPA.

Ad Zones
“Ad zone” is usually a non-technical term. Most online advertising services and publishers use it to define the part of a web site that is set aside for the ads. Sometimes called by the even less technical name, “ad space,” it’s where the ads live.

The most desirable location for an online ad zone is “above the fold,” which means the ad zone is visible when the page on which it appears loads, without any scrolling.

Adstrip
At Blogads.com, we sometimes use the terms “ad zone” and “adstrip” interchangeably. While they don’t technically mean the same thing, they are usually located in the same place. So what’s the difference? In Blogads lingo, it’s the piece of code that calls our ad servers and retrieves the ads that are displayed on our network’s blogs. So if someone at Blogads refers to an “adstrip,” she could be talking about the technical component of a blog’s ad zone or the ad zone itself.

Putting it all together at Blogads.com
We let bloggers set a maximum limit to the number of ad units they display in each adstrip. Depending on the configuration of a blogger’s ad zones, an ad might be one of three or the only one.

If you’ve ever purchased online ads, there is a good chance that the cost of advertising was given to you in either CPM, CPC or CPA. Unless you’ve worked in the advertising industry, or have prior experience buying ads online, you might not have known what these similar-looking acronyms mean. But having an understanding of these methods of calculating the cost of advertising will help you understand where your ad dollars are going, and could also save you a few bucks.

In today’s installment of Digital Ad Academy, we’ll look at each of these pricing techniques and how they differ from each other.

Cost per…

Each of these acronyms start with the same two letters, “CP,” for a reason: The corresponding phrases all start with the same two words: “Cost per.” When ads are bought and sold, an advertiser is paying “per” the number of times an ad is viewed, the number of times and ad is clicked or the number of times a user purchases something after they’ve clicked the ad. There are other ways to buy ads, but these are the most common.

CPM

Believe it or not, the “M” in “CPM” does not stand for “million.” No, that would make too much sense. CPM is “cost per thousand,” with M being the Roman numeral for 1,000. While we don’t believe the Romans were selling ad units on tablets by this measure, CPM is one of the oldest ways to buy and sell ad inventory, and it’s still the most common method used today.

In online adspeak, CPM refers to the amount of money it costs for an ad to be served 1,000 times. So if a publisher is selling ads at $5 CPM, it would cost an advertiser $5,000 to receive 1 million ad impressions.

CPC

When you purchase ads by CPM, you are guaranteeing that your ad will be viewed a certain number of times. But what if you want more than just views? What if you want to make sure your ad is being clicked on as well? For this reason, ads can also be purchased by CPC, which is “cost per click.”

Some online advertising services, such as Facebook and Google, give you the option to buy ads by CPM or CPC. When choosing CPC, an advertiser is telling a publisher, “I’m not going to pay you anything unless my ad gets clicked.”

So if you purchase ads at a $5 CPC, with a $1,000 budget, then you are expecting to get 200 clicks throughout the course of your advertising campaign.

CPA

Clicks are great, but what if you want users to do something else after they’ve clicked through? When clicks aren’t enough, advertisers purchase ads on a CPA basis. CPA, in the world of advertising, has nothing to do with accountants. It means “cost per action” or “cost per acquisition.”

In a CPA deal, the advertisers are paying for each time a user takes a specific action because of the ad. This action could be anything a newsletter sign-up, to a tweet, to a purchase (hence “cost per acquisition”).

This type of deal can be risky to bloggers and publishers, though, as the conversion rates (how many people took the ad’s desired action) is largely based on the ad’s creative and the advertiser’s own web site.

Sponsorship

At Blogads, we sell our standard blogad units on a “sponsorship basis,” which is by time period rather than any of the methods described here. That said, we realize that CPM and CPC aren’t just purchase methods but important success metrics, so we provide real-time CPM and CPC for all Blogads campaigns.

In our last installment of the Digital Ad Academy, we showed you how to calculate clickthrough rates (CTR) by introducing clicks and impressions. Clicks are how many times someone clicks on an ad, and impressions are the number of times an ad is displayed.

In the world of online advertising, a common mistake is to confuse impressions with pageviews (PV), which is the number of times a page is displayed. To make things even more unclear, a pageview is sometimes referred to as a page impression.

Here’s how pageviews and ad impressions are calculated differently: Let’s say a blog has a banner ad placed above its header on all pages. A visitor opens the home page and sees the ad. So far, the blog has received one pageview, and the ad has received one impression. The user clicks through to another page, where the same ad is above the header. Now the blog has received two pageviews, and the ad has also received two impressions.

Will pageviews over a period of time match ad impressions over the same period?

Not necessarily. In the scenario above, the ad was on all pages, so the number of ad impressions was equal to the number of pageviews. If the same advertiser in that scenario had requested that the ad only be served on the home page, then the blog would have two pageviews and the ad would have only one impression.

Blogads.com sells our standard Blogads according to a sponsorsip model, which is to say that our ads appear on every page of a blog for a fixed period of time. When an advertiser visits our order page, she will see a figure that says, “up to ____ imp/wk.”  That number is based on the total number of estimated pageviews for a period of time. If the advertiser buys a one-week ad on a blog that serves 10,000 pageviews a week, it is likely that her blog will also receive about 10,000 impressions.

To recap:

Impressions = Number of times an ad is displayed on a user’s screen
Pageviews = Number of times any page has been displayed on a user’s screen
Impressions ≠ Pageviews

Sometimes these numbers are the same, but the number of impressions is often lower than the number of pageviews. If a publisher claims an ad has received more impressions than a site has received pageviews, someone is either confused or being dishonest.

Welcome to Digital Ad Academy. We’ll be using this series to break online advertising down into its core elements and explore the basics of buying, selling and tracking ads.

We begin with one of the most basic ways to measure the success of digital ad campaigns: the clickthrough rate (CTR). But before we can figure out what an ad’s CTR is, we need to understand how that particular statistic is calculated. To do this, we need to know the ad’s impressions, clicks and some basic division.

Impressions

Some ad campaigns are purchased by number of impressions. Every time an ad is displayed on a user’s screen, or every time a page loads with your ad on it, an impression is counted, regardless of clicks.

How are ad impressions measured?

Depending on the network or technology with which you’re buying or selling ads, the ad will either be accompanied by an invisible pixel or javascript code that alerts the ad’s hosting server whenever it is loaded.

Clicks

Does the ad make a user want to learn or see more? A click is counted each time a user clicks on any part of an ad. By clicking on the ad the viewer is sent to another landing page on the Web.

How are clicks measured?

Most online ad networks use some form of URL redirect to measure clicks. Before the user reaches the ad’s intended landing page, she briefly visits the ad network’s own URL for measurement. This usually happens so quickly that the user won’t even notice. Each ad has its own redirect URL, so each time that URL is loaded on the ad server, one click is counted.

Clickthrough Rate

Now that we understand impressions and clicks, we can learn how to derive the clickthrough rate, also known as clickthru rate or CTR. In plain English, an ad’s CTR is the percentage of impressions that resulted in a click.

How is clickthrough rate measured?

This is where our division skills come into play. Clickthrough rate is found with the following formula:

So, if your ad was seen 100,000 times (impressions), and 100 users clicked it, your clickthrough rate would be: 100/100,000=0.001 or .1%. Not too shabby!