OpenLinkz

I have had the OpenLinkz ad slider running on my other blog, Trade Radar, for a few weeks now. I am stunned at how well it is performing. The click through rate is more than twice that of any other ad on the site. I am just running a simple Google AdSense 468 X 60 half-banner but it gets plenty of action.

There are issues involved that web site or blog owners need to address when using sliding ads.

First, decide if you are comfortable displaying a sliding ad. Would you consider it too obtrusive and bothersome to your readers? I worried about this so I opted to only display the ad one time, on the first page viewed by the reader. Subsequent page views will not trigger the appearance of the sliding ad. Also, don't pick an ad that is too big.

Second, you need to carefully pick the appropriate ad to display. It needs to load quickly so the movement of sliding ad panel isn't "herky jerky".

Third, another aspect of picking the best possible ad is related to the payment method. This ad will definitely get clicked so you need to select an ad that has a reasonable Pay-per-Click rate. Since the sliding ad may start stealing clicks from other ads on your page, you need to carefully evaluate the best approach to maximize your earnings.

There are a number of blog posts floating around that say you should minimize the number of AdSense ads on a page in order to get the best PPC rate available for the type of content on that particular page. This is also something you should take into consideration if you choose to run AdSense in your sliding ad.

Try our wizard at OpenLinkz.com to generate the code for your own sliding ad panel but carefully consider how you will use it.

For those of you who use Blogger as your blogging platform, you may be wondering how to set up ads after each post.

Blogger allows users to set up AdSense ads after each post. But what if you want to use ads from an affiliate network or ad network of your own choice? And especially, how do you display a different ad after each post when there are multiple posts on the page? Blogger doesn't have a built-in page element that supports that functionality.

This post explains how to do it. If you know a little Javascript, it won't be too hard for you to implement.

First, you need to decide how many posts you want to display on the homepage of your blog. For our example, let's say three posts will be displayed.

We then need to set up a counter that keeps track of which post is being displayed. Blogger will loop through posts until it hits the maximum number that you designated.

Add an HTML/Javascript page element to your blog. Add some script tags to it and implement the code for the counter, initializing it as follows:

Create a function that will display your ads and enter it after the variable initialization described above. Our example does it as follows:


Then add a set of IF statements that utilize the counter to display your ads in sequence:

Note that the code increments the counter each time a post is displayed on the page.

Then, we need to obtain the HTML or script for the three ads that will be displayed. The trick is to take the statements that cause the ad to be displayed and convert those statements to Javascript document.writeln statements. This is not as hard as it seems. Peter Bromberg has written an article at EggheadCafe titled "Convert HTML/Script to Javascript Include Source". The article includes a converter. Paste the code for an ad into the first text box, click the Convert button and retrieve the document.writeln statement from from the second text box. Then take the document.writeln statement and plug into our function. After doing this three times, our function will look like the following:


We now have a function that will display a different ad for each post. We now have to call the function from the appropriate place in the Blogger template. Go to the Layout tab in Blogger and click "Edit HTML". Click the "Expand Widget Templates" checkbox. Scroll down to the section that displays the labels for a post. Look for the following line of code:


Just before the end tag for this <p> section, paste the following:


That's all there is to it!

Google's (GOOG) press release describing the expansion of a beta program for what are being called Gadget Ads has showed that "widgets" are now a mature enough technology to become a serious component in Google's ad platform.

The widgets are just Google Gadgets with some commands added to the API to support tracking user clicks. Currently, the ads are being placed on sites the old-fashioned way, based on site content and advertising agreements. There is not yet a context-sensitive engine behind the ad serving function.

For now, Google is running an expanded beta with a limited number of large advertisers but the expectation is that the technology will migrate to the AdSense platform soon. The interactive nature of the Gadget Ads is said to significantly improve click-through rates.

Advertisers are hopeful that certain ads will be sufficiently fun or useful that users will want to put these widgets/Gadgets on their own pages. Advertisers are looking at Gadget Ads as having the added benefit that it simplifies the infrastructure of viral marketing.

In any case, Google has again shown inspiration in re-purposing its Gadget format for ads and will, no doubt, rake in the dollars as the ads proliferate.

Related content: see my article at the Trade Radar blog where I discuss in more detail the business implications.