Rudd-O.com

Banner blindness. The nemesis of online publishers. Interstitials, popups, floating ads, animations, video advertising, Flash ads. All of them are hated by users, and do more harm than good. If only there was a better way.

Or maybe there is.

Today, we’ll explore how to increase ad coverage without cramming many ads — and help you exploit your content to the max. We’ll use Google AdSense, WordPress and the Intelligent content ad insertion plugin as examples — the reason I’ll use them to showcase is simplicity — but the two concepts we’re about to discuss are sound:

1. Positioning
2. A/B testing

Inserting advertisements on WordPress sites: a primer

Inserting advertisements in WordPress blogs is usually accomplished by a combination of these techniques:

1. Template editing
2. Sidebar box configuration
3. Engine enhancement (via plugins)

Template editing

Template editing is rather straightforward. You pick one of the template files, paste the ad code in the position you want them to appear, and there you go. Since WordPress template files are PHP files, you can program complicated rotating schemes and whatnot; nevertheless, it’s not easy, especially for beginners. This technique is also clumsy and limited: you don’t get the opportunity to mingle ads with content. Plus, placing ads on rotating positions is rather hard and convoluted, so 99.9% of the ads placed in this fashion remain static in only a few select positions.

Sidebar ads

Sidebar box configuration is rather easier. Whether it’s one of the basic HTML boxes you can set ad code with, or other ad rotator plugins, you basically enter the WordPress administrative interface, set the boxes up, and paste the ad code. Again, you’re even more limited in placement options, because this techinque is usually limited to the sidebar.

Engine modification

Engine modification via plugins is a bit harder. There are a few plugins that do the job (some good, some bad), and (unlike the previous two) this technique gives you the option of actually mingling ads and content. However, almost all of the plugins with this capability out there require you to manually position advertising slots inside the post content. Doing that for 3000 posts (on a medium-to-large blog, for example) is out of the question.

In this installment, we won’t explore template editing or sidebar box configuration — those topics have been explored till exhaustion and I assume you’ve already done that (you know, that’s the low-hanging fruit). We also won’t be writing any plugins that require manual intervention.

We want zero effort. And we’ll accomplish it. Keep reading to find out how.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 13:33 and is filed under Advertising, Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.