How would you code this: Web Page Advertisements

Question

I'm a person that learns best from example. Currently, I'm diving into the field of Web Development after fifteen years of developing desktop apps. I'm still getting used to all the web technologies used for developing modern web sites and everywhere I look, I see diffrent aspects of web development and have no idea how they're implemented. So I thought I'd ask you, the web experts...the wexperts :)

One area of web development that I'm really fuzzy on is website advertising, particularly how they're coded into the web pages and how the different services work (cost, structure, payout, etc.). The only approach I'm familiar with is Google Adsense, which simply requires you to sign up for free, then you add a little chunk of code into your page to display textual advertisements, then you get paid by google when some clicks on the link. Aside from Google Adsense...

1. What are some other advertisement technologies/services that can be used to place focused ads on your site, how do the economics work, and how are they coded into your site?
2. What are some common requirements that the advertised companies ask your website to meet?
3. What are Ad Networks?

I apologize if this question is too broad (or weird for that matter), remember I'm a noob :) I'm so desperate for a good overview of this topic that, in two days, I'm going to put up a 100 point bounty for anyone who can provide me with a solid understanding of how all the different approaches to website advertising work (whether it's a link to a good online resource or your own explanation).

Thanks in advance for all your wisdom!

Answer 1

The most common way, as you said, is to place a little chunk of code in the page and basically let the browser do the work. By that I mean:

<img src="http://adserver.example.com/servead?clientid=4t2oi3&amp;zone=d1o3jr" />

The server that is serving the actual page in which this code is embedded has absolutely nothing to do, it just spits out the above chunk of HTML along with all the other HTML it serves anyway.

It's now upon the browser to request this image from "http://adserver.example.com/servead?clientid=4t2oi3&zone=d1o3jr". So the browser contacts adserver.example.com and requests to see the image "servead?clientid=4t2oi3&zone=d1o3jr".

Note that an image of this name does not actually exist. The adserver looks at the supplied GET parameters, namely:

• clientid = 4t2oi3
• zone = d1o3jr

It finds out in its database who client "4t2oi3" is and what kind of ads it's supposed to display in the clients zone "d1o3jr". Zones are typically used as "placeholders", they represent a space of a defined pixel size. There are typically a number of banners of this size attached to the zone. The ad server now selects one of these banners randomly* and delivers the image to the browser.
*) Usually this "randomly" is based on some algorithm, the advertiser who paid more gets more views.

That's the basic idea. This scheme can be used with iframes, Javascripts, Flash embeds, basically anything that can be pulled from a URL. Internally the banners are often organized by clients, advertisers, zones and campaigns and the ad server mixes and matches based on more or less complex algorithms.

The basic idea there is that advertisers upload banners into a pool, usually tagged with things like categories, areas of interest etc. The client on the other hand chooses a zone he wants to place on his site. The zone could be chosen by size, topics/keywords/interests, type (flash, image, etc) or any combination thereof. The adserver then selects banners that fit the criteria and circles through them. The advertiser gets billed based on impressions or already got billed in advance and the banner is taken out of the loop after a fixed number of impressions. The client gets paid based on impressions.

You can download software like OpenX to play around with these kinds of things yourself.

Answer 2

It depends on the types of advertisments, most if not all ppc ads work just like google adsense, though they have their own TOS, payment schemes, etc,etc. Banners are almost ineffective now. However with banners the site admin takes payments from advertizers to show a certain number of banners for a certain amount. and the site admin is responsible for keeping count of how many banners are shown, this can be done easily in any scripting language.

The best types of advertiments today are not really paid adverts, rather the site owners get commission for sales, or actions (called CPA). In these it is upto the site owner as to how they wish to put up the advertisments. Some people simply put reviews of a few products and send visitors to their sites, while some people make entire webshops or virtual shops of thousands of products they are promoting, the most widely known are the clickbank shops.

While many people do put advertisments, some people are more apt to just selling their own products.

There is no standard commission plan or anything, everything differs from site to site. I really don't know what else to put here. The details could cover a book and then some, but on the other hand there really is nothing to say except that: look at various, CPC, CPA and affaliate programs and go from there.

Answer 3

To complete deceze explanation there are some other details that should be taken into account, to name a few:

Context

Good ad servers nowadays display their ads on their publisher network using some kind of context analysis, this means that a website that talks about programming probably won't be displaying ads about babies clothes, and vice versa.

Costs

Normally advertisers have several costs: CPI (impression), CPC (click) and not so often due to added complexity CPA (action) and CPS (cost per sale). Ad servers like AdSense also have a quality factor - a person that barely clicks on ads will have a higher click cost than a person that clicks on several ads, sometimes several times.

Fraud

Its essencial to mantain the ad server as fraudless as possible, otherwise a publisher could click it's on ads placed in on his own website and earn money by doing that. Normally this kind of check is done using unique IP addresses.

Answer 4

One of the fundamentals based on which the online advertisements exists is that for the same page request, a browser can request data from several different servers.

Online Advertising companies take advantage of this fact and buy 'inventory' (spaces) on publishers (people on whose site ad is displayed) and in turn request a small script to be run on each web page.

On every request the details like ipaddress, site, connection speed, browser, cookies (if enabled) are sent to the advertising servers which respond back with an appropriate advertisement to display.

This is a very generic model.

There are future enhancements which can allow multiple advertisers to bid in real time for the money to be spent in order to decide who wins the bid. But that is for another day.