Types of Website Advertisements

There are a few basic types of advertisements that can be built into your website, depending on the type of traffic you’re building and the types of questions that bring your visitors to you from search engines.

Contextual Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

This is one of the most common, and commonly recognized, types of online advertising. Advertising servers (like Google and Yahoo) scan web pages, “read” the content, and decide what types of ads match the subject or topic of the website.

• Pros: Easy to set up, and many programs do not require minimum traffic. Accounts are easy to register, and colors & style can usually be adjusted with a simple visual user interface. Once an ad is customized and activated, you just have to add a few lines of script text and they will show up in a few minutes.
• Cons: Revenue fluctuates, its not guaranteed, and earnings tend to be pretty low overall. Something I’ve noticed too, is that some times when I write about something that I think is scammy or a waste of money – and warning my readers to stay away from such offers – those are the exact types of offers advertising on my site. This could be a big downfall for consumer watch-dog and advocacy websites.

Affiliate Programs

This seems to be the most popular advertising for the most successful website publishers. Pick your specific product, and try to sell that. Like a salesman, you get a return when someone buys the product from you.

• Pros: Affiliate programs ensure that your content directly matches your product, avoiding the occasional mis-match problem in contextual PPC campaigns. You pick specific products you are confident in and truly recommend – you write about them, why you enjoyed them, and you try to get traffic from people who are looking for opinions or reviews.
• Cons: No sales? No pay. Part of the reason why each sale is so valuable to the webmaster is because the company advertising its product doesn’t pay for ads that do not bring them revenue. There is no guaranteed income – unless you’re selling the product.

Page Impression Advertising

Some advertising campaigns get paid for every time the ad is shown, regardless of clicks or sales. Website owners can earn $3-$30 per thousand views (depending on site quality, traffic quality, and other factors)

• Pros: This is a great solution for websites that have a lot of brief traffic in a day. If people come to visit the site but only look at a few pages before moving on and don’t tend to click a lot of links before they bounce, systems like this will allow the webmaster to be paid a part of a cent for every time the ad is shown. You don’t have to make sales, you don’t have to even get clicks.
• Cons: Top-end profits are pretty limited. Other forms of advertising are usually necessary to supplement page-view advertising campaigns, as high traffic will often coincide with high server and hosting costs.