Last month I came across a completely new Danish project called eAds. They are offering a really exciting system for the rotation and administration of banners on your website.
First of all, I would like to lavish some praise on their website. Check it out – you will find the link at the bottom of this article. That’s the way to do it! This is definitely a website with selling power.
Within the first 10 seconds (including the time it took to download the site) I had fully understood the concept - and the product. All of the information is on the first page. They were able to explain the whole idea behind their service in three lines of text and 9 short points. No less than brilliant!
You ought to visit this website even if you do not need a banner management tool. It is simple a pleasure. You may find it sparse – even boring – but I can assure you that it works. Design, structure, texts - everything has been optimised and task-focused. It is clear and simple, easy to access, understand and "buy".
So, back to the product…..
If you want to make money from your website by selling banner advertisements, you need some kind of system to handle the rotation of the banners, the creation of advertisers etc.
Some choose to enter into a sales and administration agreement with one of the large banner networks; others wish to handle the task themselves. The advantage of outsourcing is, of course, that it is easier. There is no need to worry about operations or sales. The disadvantage is that banner networks make you pay well for their assistance. This means that even the most popular sites often feel that their own profit is on the low side – to put it diplomatically :)
As I already mentioned, if you want to handle the practicalities yourself, you will need some form of tool - software - to keep track of advertisers, campaigns and banners. You will also have to handle sales yourself. This can be a manageable job for some but overwhelming for others. Much depends on the type of website you are running, potential advertisers and your relationship with them.
You then have to decide whether you want to purchase your own software, and install it on your own server, or whether you prefer a hosted solution. In the case of the hosted solution, all of the necessary software is available on the service provider’s servers and you can create your own campaigns and upload banners via a browser interface.
eAds belongs to the latter group of solutions and is a hosted service. But eAds outclasses all of the others – it is simply better on all levels. I have used it on joyzone.dk for about 2 months and am extremely satisfied.
eAds differs from other solutions in the following ways:
- The banners are on your own server. Therefore, you are not dependent on the speed of eAds’ servers. The only thing you need to retrieve from their server is the code for the banner ad. The banner itself is on your server and, therefore, is downloaded at the same speed as the rest of the site.
- eAds supports both ordinary gif banners (both animated and static) and rich media banners – that is to say, banners based on HTML which can include Flash, Java, DHTML (if you dare) and forms.
- eAds is free of charge if you let them have 10% of your banner viewings. This means that every tenth banner displayed on your site is a banner ad from one of eAds’ own advertisers instead of your own. In other words, you pay 10% of your advertising turnover for the use of the system. This is an extremely attractive price for small and medium-sized websites! You don’t need to pay a penny.
- If you pay set-up costs of DKK 4995 (one-off charge) and DKK 399 per month, you do not need to display eAds banners – all advertising is your own. This professional solution provides you with free telephone support, you can export to a database and eAds will host your banners. Finally, you have free choice of banner format. In the case of the hosted solution, you can only select standard banner formats because eAds places 10% of all advertisements.
With eAds you can create customers and provide them with their own login and password so that they can view statistics of their own campaigns and banners online. When you log in as the administrator, you will, of course, have access to the full set of statistics.
You can create campaigns as well as customers. A campaign is linked to a customer and you can link one or more banners to the campaign.
You create a banner by specifying the banner’s URL as well as the URL you want the advertisement to point to, the weighting, the size, whether you want it to open in a new window etc. A banner can be linked to a campaign and/or an advertiser.
The weighting indicates how often the banner should be displayed in relation to the other banners in the system. eAds’ description in their own help file is particularly well formulated ....
- The weighting indicates how many times this banner should be displayed in relation to the other banners in the system. Enter a number between 0 and 99. If the weighting is 0, the banner will never be displayed. If there are 10 banners in the system, each with a weighting of 1, each banner will have a 10% chance of being displayed. If you want a specific banner to be displayed more often than the others, simply give it a higher weighting.
When you are finished setting up the first advertisements, simply click on “Create code” and – lo and behold – it will spit out ready-made HTML code which you can insert directly into your pages. Anyone can do it :-)
I have used eAds on joyzone.dk for about 2 months now and I am extremely satisfied.
It works really well. I certainly haven't encountered any problems. It is easy to use and, as far as I can tell, is stable.
Therefore, I can warmly recommend eAds if you need to handle your own banner ads.
Visit eAds...
This article was written in Danish by Mikkel deMib Svendsen and published in:
"Newsletter on search machine optimisation, traffic analysis and marketing on the Internet."
The article has later been translated by the independent (and human) translation service
Danish-English.com
