Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Ad Management services versus doing it yourself

Should you use an advertising management solution such as DFP Small Business or do it yourself?

(DFP stands for DoubleClick For Publishers. DoubleClick was bought by Google in March 2008 for $3.1 billion.)

If someone approaches me and wants to advertise on one of my sites my usual response is to tell them to use Google's AdWords program and target my site or pages on my site with their adverts. In my opinion, Google does a great job and they only take 32%. I don't have to get involved at all.

Sometimes it is worth my while to split that 32% with an advertiser and I'll add their advert to a site for a given time period.

The advantages of doing it yourself are advantages for the the advertiser, not for you the publisher:

  • If you host the advert's image and text on your site then it is almost impossible for Ad Blockers to block the ads because they are integrated images.
  • Your advertiser gets a one-way follow link to their site from your page.

The disadvantage is that you have to create an embedded solution to allow advertisers to upload their adverts to your site (the sophisticated solution) or you have to do it manually. Doing this yourself requires work on your part either way and you will have to measure the Return On Investment and if that extra revenue over AdSense is worth it.

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