The Ad Network Dilemma

This week AdAge reported online CPM's are down 20% industry wide. The culprit? Online ad networks.

This is the basic dilemma of all online publishers. Do you devalue your brand by allowing advertisers to pay a discounted price for your ad space, or do you maximize your sell-through rate by allowing ad networks to sell your otherwise unsold inventory at reduced rates?

The trick is to be vigilant in not allowing your target advertisers to get on your site through the networks. This is easier for highly trafficked sites with a desirable demographic. When I worked at wsj.com, the ad sales team never strayed from rate card. But they didn't need to. They knew their clients would pay a premium to be on The Wall Street Journal.

But what about less popular sites, like The Christian Science Monitor's csmonitor.com? (one of my favorite sites - I worked there for 6 years.) Their revenue is comprised mainly of print subscription revenue, although they recently announced a switch to a mainly digital model. With low advertiser demand, they may have no choice but to offer their inventory at lower rates and try to sell as much inventory as possible through the ad networks.

The bottom line is this: if your content isn't differentiated enough, you won't deliver a targeted audience or garner a premium CPM. Your lower-than-ideal sell-through rates will force you to surrender your inventory to the ad networks. There's no shame in this. Everyone does it, and it's part of any smart revenue strategy. But before allocating a huge percentage of your inventory to the ad networks, make sure you've exhausted all possible channels through topic-based and behavioral targeting. And by all means make sure you block your target advertisers from appearing on your site through the networks.

SEO Tips: Incoming Links

Incoming links to your site are one of the most important factors in gaining Google page rank. It's extremely important that the incoming links use the keywords you're optimizing for and that they're not buried in Javascript or images.

The following is a list of incoming links with no value:

•Images
•Company Name
•“Click here”
•You can be penalized for outgoing links if they link to a “link farm”
•links from a site that isn’t indexed, links from a link farm
•links that point somewhere else first, like an ad server that records the click
•Links within Javascript
•Links that don’t use the HREF tag but a Javascript event handler such as onclick or rewrite
•Links with a rel=“nofollow” tag. This allows sites to prevent people from placing links just to boost their Page rank.

Have you taken control of your online identity?

I just calculated my online identity at http://www.onlineidcalculator.com/. The result? I'm a digital dabbler. Here's their definition of a digital dabbler:

"There is some information on the Web about you that supports the personal brand you're trying to communicate but not a ton of it. What you have to do here is beef up the amount of on-brand information about you on the Web. Fortunately, this is an easy fix. You can do that by starting your own blog and updating it consistently, as well as creating a public LinkedIn profile and writing articles for online publications."

So that's just what I'm going to do.