Exchange of advertising banners. Banner exchange (banner exchange)

Website Meter - This counter displays not only the total number of visitors, but also statistics by day and hour. Also on the site you can find some useful tools for a web designer: the mailing optimizer makes spreading news easier and optimizes your marketing efforts. The site also has a banner exchange system. Working with search engines - adding your site to the search engine database and tracking position, keyword analysis and meta tag generator. Of course, some of this stuff only works with English-language sites...

TBN - A fairly well-known banner exchange system - TBN from AGAV, one of the most common domestic banner exchange systems. 468x60, 100x100, 120x60, 150x80, 154x60, 468x15. Quite a wide selection of tariff plans. You can also sell impressions. There are webmaster networks (for exchanging banners between resources for webmasters), general. Quite a good filter from porn resources. Commission - from 15% depends on traffic to your site

LBN - Previously, this network was one of the leading banner exchange systems, but now it is gradually losing ground. 460*60, 100*100, 120*60. Quite low commission - 10%. There are thematic networks - for sites on music, automotive, and tourism topics.

XBN is a private banner exchange network that works only with the 640*60 format. Very large commission - 20%. The meaning of the existence of such a network is not very clear

Network for webmasters - includes sites for web programmers and web designers and anyone interested in website development. Banner formats - 468x60, 100x100, 120x60, 88x31. Quite a small commission

RBE - Runet banner exchange system. There are the following options: 100*100, 460*60. One of the rare networks that still supports the 720x60 format. But the commission is quite high - 20%

Writers Association - You can choose the options 640*80, 100*100. Unfortunately, the commission is quite high - 10%. But the good news is that the exchange comes with very high-quality resources (shops, porn resources, etc. are excluded). Network media, socio-political resources, as well as offline media presented on the Internet

Network for music sites - Exchange of banners for music resources

RusWEB is a Russian business banner network for business websites and business-related websites. Formats - 460*80, 120*60. Quite low commission - 10%

Exchange of links - Exchange of links in the MyLinki.Ru promotion system will help your site become more famous. You create a description of the site (name and purpose), then send a partnership request to the owner of the site you have chosen, again through this system

Linkexchange - The network includes a large number of resources - about 30,000. 120*60, 100*100, 640*60... The commission depends on the traffic to your site - from 15 percent

Thousands of articles on the Internet are devoted to describing ways to promote and promote websites. One of the most popular and democratic methods today remains the following: banner exchange. The main argument in defense of banner exchange is its supposedly zero cost and good efficiency. What's really going on?

The essence of banner exchange

The essence of banner exchange is quite simple. What happens is something like this: the owners of two sites cooperate by displaying each other’s banners on the pages of their sites. Visitors to their sites click on banners, as a result of which site owners exchange not only banners, but also visitors. However, this type of banner exchange has practically no prospects, so entire ones are being created on the network. These systems constantly attract new participants, thereby expanding the audience to which the banners of system participants will be shown. It is known that for the most complete promotion of a website, a large target audience is needed.

Problems encountered when exchanging banners

And this is where the problem may arise. You, as the site owner, participate in banner exchange system, and for the time being everything is going well: visitors to other resources click on your banners - more and more new visitors come. But you will never be able to predict which company’s banner will be shown next on your website. If for the owner of a non-commercial resource the appearance of a banner with a half-naked beauty does not pose a serious danger, then the owner of a reputable construction company most likely will not be delighted with such a “surprise”. In this situation, a seemingly harmless, and most importantly, free banner can cause serious image and financial damage to the site owner. And even staying in an “elite” banner system cannot completely protect against such unpleasant situations.

It turns out that banner exchange is not even a free way to advertise your site, although you have to pay not with real money, but with your reputation, site design and unforeseen material losses.

Advantages and disadvantages

On the other hand, we can still talk about some. Let's say you, the purpose of which is to advertise a certain product or service. At the same time, other people's banners are displayed on your resource on all pages in different places. When a visitor lands on the title page of a website, he often cannot understand where he is and why. Your goal is to send potential buyers who click on your banner on someone else’s website to a specific page on your resource, where they will find the advertised product and service.

Another plus Banner exchange can be considered an accumulation of banner impressions. Those. By showing other people's banners, you pause the display of yours, accumulating them. And then, with the help of this advertising stock, you begin to actively promote new materials, products and services, directing the flow of visitors specifically to them.

A banner is a separate genre of web graphics, which requires the presence of certain rules when creating it. When you click on the link, you are taken to the advertised page. The banner itself is a graphic file (usually GIF format) placed on someone else's page and having a hyperlink

Recently, on the Russian Internet, and perhaps on the foreign Internet too, there has been such an abundance of banner standards that even a professional can easily get confused in them.

The modern classification of banners can be presented as follows. Firstly, all banners are divided into three main categories: graphic, text and so-called interactive banners created using Java or Macromedia Flash technologies.

Text banners have their own banner exchange networks, for example, the popular TX3 text link exchange system, but we will talk about them, as well as about interactive banners, a little later. Let's start with graphic banners, which are GIF or JPEG standard pictures containing one or another advertising image. This image is a hyperlink, clicking on which redirects the client browser to the advertiser’s website.

Banners in this category are divided into animated, that is, including any moving elements, and static. Of course, they also differ in geometric dimensions, and each established standard size is a kind of standard.

The most common standard for a graphic banner is an image (static or animated) measuring 468x60 pixels. Banners of this particular format were the first to appear on the World Wide Web. In second place in popularity are the so-called buttons, or small banners of 88x31 pixel format. There are also banners in sizes 392x72, 100x100, 234x60, 125x125, 120x90, 120x60 and 120x240 pixels.

Since the time it takes to load graphic images into the browser is very critical for most Internet users, strict restrictions are also imposed on the size of the file containing the banner: in general, it should not exceed 10 KB.

Text banners

So far, there is only one service on the Russian Internet that exchanges text links, somewhat reminiscent of newspaper advertisements. Don't you know how to draw? No problem: for an advertising campaign, all you need to do is prepare a short advertising text in the Notepad editor and, having registered in the text banner exchange service TKhZ, start showing similar links from other network participants. Alas, today not all resources are accepted into the TKhZ network, but only those whose owners were specially invited to cooperate by the administration of this service, have accounts in the RLE banner exchange system or several other exchange networks, are recommended by other participants in the system, or have passed a strict check during the registration process and were approved by the server moderators. Sites in Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian languages ​​are accepted for consideration. The TKhZ system allows you to place up to three text banners simultaneously within one web page.

A number of strict restrictions are also imposed on the layout of a text banner: its size should not exceed 200 characters, each word should not contain more than 15 characters. You will have to tinker a lot to prepare competent advertising text that meets all these requirements. The size of the field in which the text banner is displayed is flexible, which is an important advantage for advertising of this type: you can easily adjust the text advertising module to any design of your resource.

The exchange is carried out in a ratio of 100:80, but the registered participant receives from the system a kind of starting capital in the amount of 20 thousand impressions for free.

It is somewhat surprising that, according to the rules of membership in the TKhZ network, the participant does not have the right to sell, give or otherwise provide banner displays to other network members. Even if you own several popular sites that use TKhZ advertising, you cannot advertise one of them using the impressions accumulated in the account of another. There is a system of fines for violating the rules of using the system, which provides for the deduction from your account of 100 thousand impressions or the amount of impressions in the amount of your weekly traffic, if this value is more than one hundred thousand. It is difficult to understand what justifies such harsh laws for participation in TKhZ: apparently, being a monopolist in the field of exchanging text links, TKhZ considers itself to have the right to dictate any conditions to users. We can only hope that with the advent of other competitive text banner exchange services, the conditions for membership in this system will become more democratic and respectful towards the owners of private and corporate Internet resources.

Interactive banners

Interactive banners created using Macromedia Flash, CGI, HTML elements, Java scripts or VBS scripts are becoming increasingly popular on the modern Internet. When creating banners of this type, the designer demonstrates almost all of his artistic abilities and programming skills. Interactive banners have a much greater impact on the viewer than traditional banner advertising and are characterized by a wider range of technical capabilities. Just a few of them are listed below.

Interactive banners, especially those created using Macromedia Flash technology, open the door to more complex animation effects than traditional GIF animation. For example, smooth changes in the shape of objects (the so-called morphing), control of drawing layers with varying degrees of transparency, and setting complex trajectories of object movement with a relatively small volume of the final file are available.

The space of an interactive banner is not homogeneous: it may include several hyperlinks that redirect the browser to different sections of the same site or to different Internet resources.

An interactive banner is truly interactive: it can respond to the movements of the user’s mouse cursor, while changing animation effects, inscriptions, layout of elements and other image fragments.

Interactive banners can contain various dynamic controls, such as buttons, menus, text fields, etc. You can arrange for another banner to load after a certain time interval if the user does not respond to the banner presented first.

An interactive banner (in particular, a banner created using MacromediaFlash technology) can contain various sound effects, from a background sound in MIDI or MP3 format to short audio inserts that are played when any user action: hovering the mouse over the banner field, clicking a button on it mice, etc. Moreover, different sections of the banner may correspond to different sound effects.

In general, an interactive banner is a text file with a code listing in a particular programming language or with a fragment of HTML code, which, when processed, the client browser downloads all the missing files and banner fragments from the advertiser’s server.

Interactive banners created using CGI technology are also a snippet of HTML code. In this case, when the user clicks on the active elements built into the banner, the CGI script installed on the advertiser’s server is called for execution.

Using interactive banners, you can create drop-down menus, each item of which will send the user to the desired section of your site, conduct sociological research without forcing the user to go to your page, subscribe to your mailing list from remote servers, and much more.

Interactive banners are not without serious shortcomings. The main one is that not all visitors will be able to see such a banner on the web page advertising you, since some of them have older versions of browsers installed that do not support processing of Java Script scripts, or such support is simply disabled. Banners created using Macromedia Flash require

special add-ons in user browsers. If such an add-on is missing, the browser will try to download it from the Macromedia website and install it on the client computer automatically. However, when a scary-looking window with an exclamation point appears asking users to download Macromedia extensions, many of them subconsciously click the No button without even reading the warning text. Thus, refusing to install add-ons will not allow them to enjoy looking at your banner, and you, as the owner of the advertised resource, will not allow you to get another visitor and potential client.

Banner effectiveness

The effectiveness of a banner is not an abstract concept, but a completely material one that can be accurately quantified. The unit of measurement for the effectiveness of a particular banner is considered to be the ratio of the number of clicks on the banner to the number of its impressions. This value is also called CTR (Click/Through Ratio). Calculating the effectiveness of banner impressions is very simple. If, let's say, you showed your banner to users of the World Wide Web 1000 times, and only 10 of them clicked on the banner and visited your site, the CTR of such a banner would be 10%. However, do not be fooled by this figure in relation to the impressions of your banners: the average CTR on the modern Internet is only 2.11%. This does not mean that all other impressions are wasted: if you manage to create an interesting and memorable banner, it will become a kind of carrier of image advertising for your site, helping users remember, if not its address, then at least its name.

Banner exchange systems

It's time to talk about the so-called banner networks, or, in other words, banner exchange systems. What is the principle of their operation? You create a banner of a standard size that is supported by the advertising service you need, and, having previously registered on the server of this banner exchange network, upload the banner to this server. After that, you place on your page the fragment of code offered to you by the exchange network and thus begin to show banners of other network participants in a certain numerical ratio, that is, your banner will be shown a slightly smaller number of times than you will show someone else’s. This is where the commercial interest of the banner exchange service lies. Let’s say that your site had ten impressions of other people’s banners, and your banner was shown eight times. There are still two impressions left, which the service uses to its advantage, that is, inserts its own paid advertising. This is where the concept of impression ratio, known to users of banner networks, originates. For example, an impression ratio of 100:85 means that for one hundred impressions on the website of a participant in the exchange system, his banner will be shown 85 times.

Most banner agencies will also offer you many free, but very attractive additional services: individual planning of your advertising campaign (you can adjust not only the theme of the sites on which you want to display your own banners, but also their territorial coverage, display time, etc. ), automatic CTR calculation. They will track the traffic of the most popular pages on your site for you, as well as a list of pages from which users most often leave your resource.

Summary information about the most popular Russian banner exchange services today is presented below.

Russian Link Exchange (RLE) (http://www.linkexchange.ru)

The main banner formats accepted by this system are 468x60, 100x100 and 120x60. RLE also supports its own RLE Stroll format - displaying banners sized 100x100 pixels in a separate window, dynamically created on the computer screen using

corresponding Java script. In addition to traditional graphic banners, RLE accepts interactive ones developed using Java, CGI, HTML and Macromedia Flash technologies. The limit on the size of graphic files that make up banners is 15 KB. The exchange is carried out in a ratio of 2:1 if your site displays less than 500 banners of other network members per day, and in a ratio of up to 7:6 if the number of impressions you carry out is greater. RLE offers participants detailed statistics on visits, flexible management of banner impressions and customization of banner impressions based on several parameters, so you can independently plan your own advertising campaign. Anyone can register in the Russian Link Exchange system; to do this, you just need to fill out the appropriate interactive form on the server www.linkexchange.ru.

InterReklama (http://www.ir.ru)

The Inter Reklama banner network accepts graphic banners measuring 468x60 pixels in GIF format for display; their size should not exceed 12 KB.

Inter Reklama also allows users to plan and flexibly manage their advertising campaign, customizing the display of banners by region of the country, time of day and subject of the pages on which they would like to place their advertising. The exchange is carried out in a ratio of 100:85. Registration on the server www.ir.ru is open to everyone.

Reklama.RU (http://www.reklama.ru)

Unlike its competitors, the Reklama.RU banner exchange network does not accept into its ranks all website owners, but only those whose resource is capable of displaying 400 or more other people’s banners per day and is interesting for placing paid advertising from the point of view of Reklama.RU owners, and also meets a number of other very high requirements. Graphic banners of 468x60 pixel format with a volume of no more than 15 KB are accepted, the exchange ratio is 100:85.

One of the positive features of this exchange service is a very convenient interface for working with an account: if a network member uses several banners, he can create his own profile for each of them and assign different display scenarios to them. Banners can be combined into groups and flexibly manage the part of the advertising campaign in which they are used.

F2 (http://www.f2.ru)

This system accepts banners with dimensions of 468x60, 100x100 and 120x60 pixels for display; two banners can be placed on one page; the size of the graphic file should not exceed 15 KB. The exchange is carried out in a ratio of 100:95, and it may vary depending on the number of impressions on the site of banners of other clients of the system. The system does not allow erotic resources, collections of software and programs for hacking it, as well as resources that are not interesting in the opinion of network owners for placing paid advertising, that is, most home pages, so-called collections of freebies, etc. Commission imposed by the F2 network for the impressions you receive, is calculated using a fairly complex system that takes into account not only the number of impressions itself, but also the average CTR on your site, the location of the banner (at the top or bottom of the page), as well as a number of other criteria. The user can individually set up scenarios for displaying their own banners, receive detailed statistics on the progress of the advertising campaign, and, if necessary, take a certain number of impressions on credit from the network or sell the accumulated impressions for real money. Anyone can register in the F2 system.

Foreign banner networks

Internet Link Exchange (http://www.linkexchange.com)

This is one of the most popular banner exchange systems in the world. If your resource is designed to work with foreign visitors, Internet Link" Exchange is exactly what you need. Banners of 468x60 pixel format are accepted for display, exchange is carried out in a 2:1 ratio, the file size should not exceed 14 KB. There is a system for flexible account settings recordings and the ability to manage an advertising campaign.

Banner Exchange Network (http://bannerexchange.mycoinputer.com)

This banner exchange service uses 468x60px banner graphics and delivers impressions at a 2:1 ratio. The maximum allowed size of a graphic file is 14 KB. A banner display management system and a statistics service are available. You can manage impressions of no more than three of your banners at the same time.

The Hit Exchange (http://www.hitexchange.net)

The Hit Exchange banner exchange network is perhaps one of the most democratic systems among similar foreign servers. Here, graphic banners of 468x60, 400x40 and 400x50 pixel formats are accepted for display; the commission ratio for impressions is 60:1. You can simultaneously manage impressions of eight banners, receive detailed statistics on visits to your site, and configure advertising campaign parameters using more than five different options.

Anyone can become a participant in all of the above foreign banner exchange systems.

website information program content

2. Special part

A kind of advertising barter is very common on the Internet. Sites of similar topics that are not direct competitors often exchange buttons, banners, and text links leading to each other’s sites. The purpose of such an exchange is quite clear - a mutual increase in attendance.

Selecting partners for direct link exchange

Direct exchange of links has much in common with direct advertising on advertising platforms. The main difference is that payment is made not in money, but by providing the partner with advertising space on the site. Most of the criteria for choosing advertising platforms for direct advertising placement can also be used when choosing sites for exchanging links, banners, etc. This section discusses criteria that take into account the features of the procedure for direct advertising exchange. Below are the most important ones.

The exchange must be equal. It is quite difficult to find sites that have the same traffic. Let's consider two sites with different traffic that exchange banners on a permanent basis, for example, on the main page. It is clear that a site with less traffic will, as a rule, benefit, and a site with more traffic will, accordingly, lose from such an exchange. There are many tools to ensure fair exchange:

• exchange of equal number of banner impressions. If both sites have the ability to take into account the number of advertising impressions, it is possible to exchange impressions in a one-to-one ratio, i.e., for example, each of the sites makes 100 thousand impressions of the partner’s banner on its pages;
• exchange of equal number of visitors. Similar to exchanging an equal number of impressions, sites can exchange an equal number of visitors. If, after a certain period of time, there is an imbalance in visitors, the site from which more visitors came to the partner’s site temporarily stops displaying advertising until the balance is equalized;
• exchange of links or banners for different times. If the traffic of one of the sites is higher than the traffic of the other, say, by 20%, it is possible to reach an agreement that the site with more traffic places a partner’s advertisement on its pages, for example, for five days, and the site with less traffic for six;
• exchange of banners of different formats. A site with less traffic can host a partner banner, for example, in the 468x60 format. In exchange for this, a site with more traffic can place a 100x100 or 120x60 banner on its pages;
• exchange of banners located in different places on the site. A banner on the main page of a site with less traffic can be exchanged for a banner located on one of the pages of any section of the site with more traffic. Similarly, you can exchange, for example, banners located at the top and bottom of the page.

The partner should not be a competitor. It is not advisable to exchange advertising with a direct competitor. If a company is running a promotion and a competitor’s advertisement is posted on its website, some of the attracted customers will go to that competitor. This situation is unacceptable. Many sites do not host competitors’ advertisements even on a commercial basis and even at increased prices.

Economic feasibility must be observed. Before making a decision to exchange banners, it is necessary to evaluate the possible result of such an exchange and compare it with alternative options for using the advertising space that is planned to be used for the purpose of the exchange.

If it is possible to sell advertising space to an advertiser, this is not a reason to refuse the exchange. The question is the price. If the expected economic effect from attracting new visitors to the site through exchange turns out to be higher than the revenue from the sale of advertising space, it makes sense to use it for exchange rather than for sale.

In addition to direct sales, it is possible to use the advertising space in question to participate in banner networks. In this case, you need to estimate the number of target visitors that can come to the site through advertising in the banner network and compare it with the number of visitors expected from direct link exchange. Such a comparison will not always speak in favor of direct exchange.

Placing a partner’s banner on the company’s website should not harm the company’s reputation. Before making a final decision about exchanging links, you need to evaluate the reputation of a potential partner in more detail and familiarize yourself with their banners. A partner’s dubious reputation and low-quality (in every sense) banners can negatively affect the company’s image.

It must be remembered that the proposal will be analyzed taking into account the criteria given above. Therefore, you need to try to maximize the benefits that a potential partner will receive by agreeing to an offer to exchange advertising.

Advantages and disadvantages of direct exchange of links and banners

• no direct cash costs;
• control over the placement of the banner on the partner’s website. Unlike, for example, the exchange organized by banner networks, with a direct exchange of links or banners, both partners know in which place on the site the banner of each of them will be placed;
• the possibility of organizing direct exchange for image advertising. In this sense, direct exchange differs little from commercial advertising;
• minimal possibility of cheating. As a rule, when exchanging links directly, cheating is either completely impossible (simply pointless) or very unlikely. This is a serious advantage of direct exchange over exchange using banner networks.

About the relatively quick “burning out” of banners. As with direct advertising, the partner's banner is shown only to the audience of one site, which, as a rule, is not updated very quickly. Accordingly, banners burn out faster than in banner networks;

• the complexity of the procedure for finding partners and reaching exchange agreements;
• low mobility in managing an advertising campaign (you need to coordinate your actions with each partner).

Chapter 6 Banner Exchange

The concept and essence of banner exchange

Banner exchange is the optimal choice of an advertiser at the first stage of the existence of his Internet project or promotion of specific goods or services online. The reason for this is the possibility of free exchange of advertising media. To understand the essence of advertising exchange in banner networks, you need to dwell on such important concepts as exchange commission, division into subnets, transfer and promotion of impressions, targeting, “lifting” impressions, purchasing impressions and CTR (the ratio of the number of clicks on an advertising banner to the number of its impressions).

Exchange commission

The exchange commission can be called a fundamental factor in the functioning of almost any banner exchange network. Since most banner networks do not charge a participant (advertiser) a fee for exchanging advertising with other network participants, a certain commission percentage is charged from each advertiser’s user account in a specific banner network for advertising impressions, which serves, in some way, as payment advertising exchange.

The exchange involves mutual placement of advertising, so if 10 banners were shown on the site of one network participant, then on the sites of other participants in the same banner network the banners of the first participant will be shown, for example, 8 times. The banner network takes the difference in impressions, which is called the exchange commission. The amount of the commission percentage can be influenced by a number of factors: the visibility of the banner on the pages of a network member site, unauthorized code changes, the presence of separators between several banners, the indication under the banner of the name of the banner network with a link to it, as well as the location of the network banners on the page of the member site regarding banners of other advertising media exchange networks. Let's take a closer look at each of these factors.

Banner visibility

The motto of almost any banner exchange network is: “Place other people’s banners on your site the way you would like your banners to be placed on other people’s sites.” The call is certainly reasonable and logical from the position of the advertising network. The participants also understand this, but it is much more difficult for them to adhere to this rule: purely subconsciously, they want to remove other people’s banners somewhere at the bottom of the site pages (so as not to distract from the content, spoil the design, confuse them, etc.), but the banners of their own project It is advisable to see it on the most visible place on the pages of other people's sites. Therefore, certain banner networks have made the following decision: when the visibility of a network member’s banner on a website page deteriorates, the percentage of the commission charged increases. Deterioration in the visibility of a banner can be caused either artificially (intentional placement of the advertising medium in the most remote corners of the site) or due to technical errors in the layout of the site’s pages. For example, if the site structure involves the use of frames (separate working browser windows), then if the frame width is set to 450 pixels and horizontal scrolling of the composite window is prohibited, the 468x60 advertising banner will not be fully visible.

Code change

After registering in the banner network, a new participant is asked to insert a special code into the pages of his Internet project, which will carry out advertising displays of banners of other sites participating in the network on this site. In this case, all participants are required not to change the received code. If the code does change in any way (adding new HTML instructions, changing the window opening mode after clicking on a banner link (current or new), adding JavaScript events and other client languages, placing the code in a separate inline frame, etc. .), the commission percentage increases until the moment when the code is brought into compliance with the rules of the banner network.

Presence of separators

If several different banners are placed on the page of a site participating in a banner network, it is necessary to have special horizontal or vertical dividers to indicate the boundaries of the banners. For example, if two 120x60 format banners are placed horizontally close to each other and are also similar in graphic design, the advertising messages of both media will merge, which can lead to very different user reactions: misunderstanding, bewilderment, irritation, hostility, etc. confusion. Therefore, you need to leave a certain space between banners - empty or filled with a special graphic separator, which will act as a “neutral territory” between two advertising messages. Banner networks have the right to increase the exchange commission if there is no separator or it does not clearly display its function. Also, in some cases, it is possible to slightly reduce the commission percentage for the account of a participating site, on the pages of which the interpretation of the separator is original, extraordinary or simply funny.

Banner network name

Many banner networks require their participants to include the name of the network with a link leading to its website. As a rule, the name is placed at the bottom of the banner. Unfortunately, in some cases such an inscription contradicts the page layout, thereby confusing the structure of individual blocks of site content. In the absence of such an inscription, the banner network may add a certain percentage to the base exchange commission for non-compliance with one of the rules for participation in the advertising exchange.

Relativity of location

If an Internet project is a member of several banner networks at once, any of the latter (if it complies with the rules of the network) has the right to reduce (increase) the percentage of the exchange commission depending on the location of its banner code relative to the advertising blocks of other banner networks.

For example, a project participates in three banner networks (BNs): BN1, BN2 and BNZ. Banners of the first two networks are located at the top and in the upper left corner of the site pages, BSZ banners are located at the very bottom of the pages. The BSZ network makes claims to the participating site for placement and increases the commission by 3% until its banners are either at the top left, which will reduce the commission by 5%, or at the very top of the pages, for which BSZ promises to reduce the commission percentage by as much as 12%. The upper left edge of the pages is occupied by BS2 advertising, moving which downwards threatens the site with an increase in commission of only 2%, and there is no point in moving BS2 banners to the very top, since this network does not allow a decrease in the commission percentage. The BS1 banners located at the very top already offer the smallest commission percentage (since they are the most visible), therefore, under the threat of being shifted down to the participating site, the BS1 network cannot offer a lower commission percentage. For the shift itself, BS1 charges an additional percentage, respectively: to the left edge of the pages - 1%, to the very bottom - 4% (Table 6.1).

Table 6.1.

Determining the profitability of banner placement in accordance with the commission percentage

Now let’s calculate which network’s banners are more profitable to place at the very top. If you do not take into account such factors as the average CTR of the banner network (an indicator of the effectiveness of the banner, showing the ratio of the number of clicks on the banner to the number of its impressions), the number of network participants, the type of banner network (universal, thematic, etc.), as well as the profile of the banner itself Internet project participating in three banner networks at once (BS1, BS2 and BSZ), and if we consider only the percentage of commission fees for advertising exchange, then it will be much more profitable to place banners of the BSZ network at the very top of the site pages. We change the bottom of the page (+3% additional commission) to the top of the page (-12% commission), remove the BS1 banners from the top of the page and place them on the edge (+1%). There is no point in placing BS1 advertising at the bottom of the page, since the increase in commission there is 4% more. And the commission percentage of the BS2 network after moving its banners down will increase by 2%. Total we have: +3 + (-12) + 1 + 2 = -6%.

Thus, through simple rearrangements in determining the priority banner network, we get the total commission amount of all networks to be as much as 6% less than the total base (initial) commission at the first stage of the site’s participation in the banner exchange.

This example clearly shows that many banner networks can offer their participants a very flexible system for determining the percentage of commission for an advertising exchange, which is influenced by several factors (Table 6.2). This approach is, first of all, the desire of banner networks to create a certain authority and positive image in the minds of the advertiser, as well as a successful marketing move in the Internet market, increasing the level of their own competitiveness.

Table 6.2.

Factors influencing the exchange commission percentage

Subnetting

Many banner networks have an extensive internal structure, which is determined by the presence of a certain number of so-called subnets that are part of a single main banner network. The type of subnets is determined by such criteria as subject matter, advertising format, and censorship. For example, the LBE (List Banner Exchange) banner network has five subnets: LBE, LBE-Lite, LBE-Vip, LBE100 and LBE120. The last two varieties are formed according to the banner format accepted in rotation in these subnets, 100x100 and 120x60, respectively. LBE and LBE-Lite support the same format (468x60), but differ in terms of placement on the page: the main subnet requires banners to be placed only at the top of the site pages, and the “light” (LBE-Lite) version - at the bottom. LBE-Vip is aimed at commercial advertising. An example of a network division based on censorship is the IBN (International Banner Network) banner network, which accepts advertising only of decent content. But its subnet ABN (Alternative Banner Network) works with advertising media for adults.

Translation and boost of impressions

If a participant registers a new account within the same banner network (for certain reasons), he can transfer to the newly created account all the impressions that he had accumulated on the old one.

If an Internet project participating in a banner exchange changes owner, the latter has the right to retain the impressions remaining from the previous owner within a specific banner network and even accounts.

If a banner network supports impression conversion, a member of one subnet can transfer accumulated impressions to another subnet without registering an additional user account.

Banner impressions can act as a liquid means of payment for goods or services. For example, the author of an article can be credited to his account in the banner network with a fee in the form of a certain number of impressions, and a participant in an online competition can receive a prize in the same way.

The owner of an Internet project that will soon be closed has several thousand accumulated impressions in a certain banner network. And this means expanding the consumer audience, reaching other market segments, and the opportunity to receive material benefits from advertising impressions, and finally, the prospect of selling accumulated impressions to another interested party. I don’t want to lose this opportunity, so before the project is closed, impressions are either transferred to the account of another project (partner, client, sponsor, etc.) or put up for sale. In the latter case, when the purchase of accumulated advertising impressions is completed, they are transferred to the account specified by the buyer, and the old one, registered by the seller project, is closed.

Cheating advertising impressions in banner networks is a big problem in the modern Internet advertising market, which the best domestic and foreign specialists are struggling with. The essence of cheating is to artificially increase advertising impressions for a specific user account. Currently, such powerful and most used advertising mechanisms today (on the basis of which banner impressions occur), such as RotaBanner and BannerBank, have in their arsenal effective means of combating cheating of advertising impressions.

Targeting

Targeting (from the English target - goal) is a targeted (focused) advertising impact on the consumer. There is a difference between forward and reverse targeting. Direct targeting allows you to determine the sites on which the advertiser wants to place their banners. There are several types of direct targeting.

Thematic targeting

The most used type of targeted impact on the consumer, which is based on the thematic focus of the advertised resource (product or service). For example, there is a site dedicated to beekeeping, the owner of which decides to start advertising his Internet project. In this case, there is no point in displaying beekeeping website banners on entertainment resources and dating servers, mobile communication portals and car galleries. But it would be appropriate to place advertisements in the relevant thematic sections of large resource catalogs or on the pages of generally popular services (mail servers, for example), accessible to thousands and millions of Internet users every day, among whom there may well be people who are interested in keeping bees.

However, such precision of advertising impact on the consumer audience can only be achieved with a narrow specialization of the advertised Internet project. If you are advertising a new cure for colds, topical targeting will no longer help, since people with colds visit resources on any topic.

Address targeting

Address targeting can be conditionally called a more precise version of targeting by topic. In this case, the advertiser can independently select from the list of banner network participants those sites on which his banners should not be displayed. Undesirable resources are identified by physical address on the Internet or by account number. Unfortunately, this type of targeting is not always effective and worth the effort. For example, the number of registered participants in the RLE (Russian Link Exchange) banner network is many times greater than the number of user accounts on the PBS (Power Banner System). Address targeting in RLE will take a very long time: to do this, you need to look through the entire directory of participants in the RLE Classic, RLE Gold and RLE Stroll subnets, which will take a lot of time. The same cannot be said about the PBS network, which has a much smaller roster of members.

Geographic targeting

This type of focusing advertising on the network is based on a geographical feature, i.e. the ability to position banner displays depending on a specific country, region, district, city, etc. For example, some company providing Internet access services has offices in Moscow and St. Petersburg. It has the technical base and financial capabilities to provide connections only within the two capitals and their surrounding areas. Therefore, it makes no sense for it to influence the residents of Novosibirsk or Kyiv, even if they are their potential consumers. In this regard, the company will place advertisements on Moscow and St. Petersburg Internet resources. However, there are pitfalls here too.

Firstly, it is not a fact that the resources of the two capitals where advertising for this company will be placed will be visited exclusively by residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg. A resident of Rostov-on-Don who is planning to soon move to a permanent place of residence in the capital of Russia and work in a large design studio and is therefore interested in the prices of the capital’s Internet providers can just as easily look there. And if, on the contrary, the company worked in Rostov-on-Don and advertised only for the city and the Rostov region, the manifestation of the “pitfall” of geographic targeting is also obvious: some St. Petersburg analyst or journalist in order to prepare a financial report on Internet providers in Russia I would definitely see an advertising banner of this company while exploring the Rostov Internet technology market.

Secondly, focusing on a geographical basis does not take into account the possible territorial movements of the consumer. For example, some advertising banner announces the start of a grand sale of fur and leather clothing in St. Petersburg from October 15 to November 25, and in accordance with the geographic targeting settings, advertising is shown in St. Petersburg itself, the Leningrad region and, probably, in Moscow (which quite possible due to the short distance between Moscow and St. Petersburg and the maximum concentration of financially secure people in these two cities). People living in these regions and who are potential buyers of fur and leather clothing can, in the period from October 15 to November 25 (which is as much as 40 days), go on vacation (for example, to Crimea), go on a business trip or business trip (for example , to the Urals), decide to visit relatives (somewhere in Siberia), etc. In all these cases, consumers may have some interest in an organized sale (purely theoretically, since they cannot know for sure about it) , will not see advertising messages from the company organizing the promotional sale.

Time targeting

This type of focusing advertising impressions involves influencing the consumer depending on the day of the month, day of the week and time of day. For example, one banner can be shown only on the first day of each month (information about the extension of discounts on goods or services, a reminder about the expiration dates of a certain service, etc.), another will be displayed throughout the weekend (announcement about events taking place on Saturday and Friday), the third banner is placed in rotation exclusively during the lunch break (an offer to take part in a daytime competition from a radio station), etc. Let’s take a closer look at each of the areas of time targeting.

Day of the month. Every day can be remarkable for something for the consumer: a federal or national holiday, folk signs, etc. For example, scheduling displays of advertising banners of various types on International Women’s Day (March 8) and Easter (a certain Sunday in spring) can give corresponding results for a certain strategies for influencing consumers. The advertiser can achieve the required effectiveness if he decides to play with one or another folk sign in the context of presenting advertising information (for example, Pokrov: if snow falls on October 14, the winter will be snowy, if it rains, it will be rainy, and if there is no precipitation, there will be warm, dry weather).

Day of the week. The week can be roughly divided into two parts: work and weekend. Of course, for different categories of people the concepts of “work week” and “weekend” can vary significantly. However, in general, working days are considered to be Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and weekends are Saturday and Sunday. Therefore, showing a user an advertising banner in the middle of the workweek inviting them to attend one or another entertainment event will be an ineffective advertising ploy. A similar unfortunate example would be an advertisement for evening business seminars on weekdays that is shown to consumers on the weekend.

Times of Day. As you know, during the daytime users access the Internet mainly from their workplace, in the late afternoon and at night, when prices for network access are significantly lower, they access the network from their home computers. It can also be assumed that during the working day, users use the Internet for work purposes (searching for information, working with a website, market analysis, audience research, reading and sending electronic correspondence, etc.), and during the lunch period (on average, from 12 to 15 hours) use network resources for relaxation and entertainment (reading news, jokes, games, dating, etc.). In addition, in many organizations the workday begins with reading email or analyzing online media: the morning hours (on average, from 9 to 11 am) can bring additional efficiency to the advertiser if appropriately focused on a time basis.

Of course, assessing the effectiveness of banner impressions in accordance with time targeting settings is relative, since it is impossible to reduce the behavior of people (in this case, potential consumers) to a single denominator. Some celebrate certain holidays and know folk signs, others do not; some work five days a week, and two rest, others work in shifts; some use the Internet for free in the workplace, and at home for money, others - vice versa (work traffic is limited, home access is provided through an acquaintance on a free basis); Some people read email and news in the morning and visit entertainment servers during their lunch break, while others do this in the evening and morning, respectively.

Programmatic targeting

Programmatic targeting is the ability to focus the impact of an advertiser’s advertising messages depending on the user’s software (advertising consumer). In this case, software refers to the operating system and browser.

It is known that many elements of the structure of Web pages are displayed differently in different operating systems. For example, the font size and typeface settings for Microsoft Windows will not display correctly on MacOS. This aspect is extremely important when demonstrating HTML-oriented banners, the structure of which includes text blocks of information. The situation with browsers is even more complicated: this software for viewing Web pages, depending on the model and version, may either display incorrectly or not display advertising banners at all that do not support various technologies and specifications (floating and regular frames, GIFs). animation, cascading style sheets CSS, Macromedia Flash, etc.).

Therefore, knowing that Netscape Navigator does not support CSS style templates well, you can launch the first banner using this specification into rotation only for users of the Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4.x and higher, and modify the second while maintaining the general advertising idea to comply with Netscape Navigator standards and configure its impressions according to a specific program targeting criterion.

The only drawback of this type of focusing advertising impressions is the high requirements for knowledge of all the features of operating systems and browser models and versions. Not every advertiser knows what the difference is between Opera Internet Browser and WebTV, MS Windows NT and Red Hat Linux. On the other hand, not every internet marketer (designer) has such information.

Language targeting

Focusing by language involves displaying advertising banners on pages of Internet resources containing information in a specific language. For example, if a promotion is aimed exclusively at residents of Spain, then it would be advisable to present the promotional information in the Spanish sector of the network. Thus, if the goal of the advertising campaign does not include exposure to a minor part of the consumer audience, for example, residents of Spain who were born outside the country and do not speak the national language, this type of targeting can significantly improve the effectiveness of the advertiser's banner impressions.

Unfortunately, there is also a weakness here. Firstly, in order to achieve an optimal level of effectiveness when using language focusing, it is necessary to know the national characteristics of the target audience, the ratio of the number of direct consumers to the number of secondary consumers, demographic and social statistics of the state (state, region, district, etc.), in the network segment of which there will be advertising influence is carried out (such knowledge requires serious pre-advertising preparation). Secondly, when composing advertising messages on HTML media, it is necessary to adhere to specific language encodings, thanks to which the text blocks of the advertising banner will be displayed correctly (not every browser has multilingual support).

To summarize, it should be said that the possibility of targeted impact on the advertising audience, despite some shortcomings, is a powerful tool for the advertiser in the process of organizing and implementing banner impressions (Table 6.3).

Table 6.3.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Different Types of Direct Targeting

To conclude the conversation about targeting the consumer, we should mention the concept of reverse targeting. If direct targeting allows the advertiser to determine on which resources the banners of his own Internet project will be displayed, then reverse targeting provides the opportunity for the opposite effect - the selection of network resources whose advertising banners will be displayed on the pages of the advertiser’s website. In other words, reverse targeting is the control of other people’s advertising impressions on the website of your Internet project. This focus allows the advertiser to monitor sites participating in the banner network and prohibit some of them from displaying advertising on their site. The reason for such a ban is most often that another member of the banner network is a direct competitor of your project. In this case, the presence of advertising of one resource of a certain topic on the pages of another resource of a similar focus will be inappropriate and completely unjustified. The types of reverse targeting are similar to the types of forward targeting.

Gurov Philip