The most common form of monetizing a website is pay per click (PPC) text ads popularized in recent years by Google’s AdSense program. Another common form of advertising is using banners; banner advertising was popular in the early days of the web but has lost its effectiveness in recent years since most people have learned to ignore it. Another form of advertising is interstitial ads that usually appear in pop up windows or as full page ads in the current window in-between content pages. Pop up/under ads have lost their effectiveness since web browsers have been improved to block them. However, a full page in-between content interstitial cannot be blocked and as such it is still a viable and effective advertising method.
Interstitials are routed in methods found in traditional media advertising that interrupts the flow of content to show ads. For example, a TV program is interrupted every few minutes to show commercials. Similarly on the web, interstitial ads are shown to a visitor just before he is redirected to a requested content page. These are full page ads that show the advertiser’s website in full view. The site is usually shown for a fixed amount of time, i.e., 30 seconds, and then the surfer is redirected to the requested content page. In addition, the user is given an option to skip the ad and proceed immediately to his original destination.
A publisher who uses interstitial ads is paid on a pay per click basis, i.e., whenever someone clicks on the ad. The payment model is thus similar to pay per click contextual text ads. Interstitial ads can potentially have a higher click through rate (CRT) because they are shown in a more prominent position than text ads. In addition, displaying a site’s front page can usually be more appealing to a surfer than say a two sentence text ad.
The main success of PPC text ads stems from the fact that they are non-intrusive and in the case of Google’s AdSense mostly relevant to a person’s interests. Displaying an interstitial ad every time a visitor requests a different page on your website will be mostly annoying resulting in lost visitors and PPC revenue. As a result, networks that sell interstitial advertising make sure that each unique visitor is only shown an ad a small number of times per visit and page request.
The most effective interstitial advertising program that I have found is that offered by AdBrite. In their system ads are frequency capped at once per user per day such that they are not annoying. For my network of websites, AdBrite’s CTR has been higher than Google’s contextual text ads and to this day I never had a user complain about the interstitial ads being intrusive. AdBrite also makes it easy to setup the display of interstitial ads on your website requiring that you only add a few lines of JavaScript code that they supply. Finally, AdBrite allows publishers to specify keywords to better target the ads shown helping publishers to maximize their profits.
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Peter E. is the creator of The Dollar Factory, a portal for webmasters with articles, news items, website spotlight and forum. If you are a new or old webmaster, join our growing community at Webmaster Portal: The Dollar Factory (www.TheDollarFactory.com)
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