An Interstitial is a web advertisement that appears on its own page, typically in between “content” pages. Interstitials are typically not clickable (or are linked to the page you’d originally hoped to reach), but are usually buffered by a similar, smaller advertisement on the subsequent content page that allows you to investigate the advertiser’s product. By mid-1997, interstitials were at the top of every advertiser’s want list, but have lost popularity since then.

Banners are a basic unit of advertising on the web.

They were pioneered by GNN and HotWired back in the frontier days of 1994 and are now nearly ubiquitous, appearing in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and locations. You can probably see one right now at the top of the page.

A conversion is a marketing term describing when a perspective client fulfills an intended action.

For example, when you click on an advertisement, you have committed to a trial. If you create an account or share information, you’ve been acquired. If you buy something or commit fully to the product, you’ve made a conversion.

Directly related to trial and acquisition

Have you ever seen an advertisement that implored you to “Call now!”? Of course you have. Call to action is a term for the copy in an ad that implores the viewer to do something specific in response to the advertisement. “Click here” and its variants are the most popular calls to action in online advertising.

A pageview – a single screen of content – refers to the sum total of what a user sees in a browser window. Before frames came along, pageviews were a hell of a lot easier to explain and to track:the page you saw was one simple page of content. But frame-based pages are comprised of a whole mess of documents. The Webmonkey frontdoor brings together three different pages:the frameset itself, the content page in the top frame, and the ad called up in the bottom frame. Yet in the language of pageviews, these three pages add up to a single pageview.

Clickthrough, or clickthrough rate (CTR), is the percentage at which viewers click on online ads and go to the advertiser’s site – whether to sign up for something, to make a purchase, or just to find out more.

The clickthrough percentage calculation is arrived at by dividing the gross number of clicks by the gross number of advertising impressions served.

With the proliferation of ad-blocking software, and, worse, the widespread anesthesis of the ad neuron in web surfers’ brains, the classic 468×60 banner ad is not the unquestioned moneymaking powerhouse it once was. Advertisers are looking for alternative ways to grab attention.

One inevitably popular approach is to make web ads bigger, flashier, more ubiquitous, and more obtrusive. Flash-based banners, JavaScript popups and popunders, interstitial ad pages, enormous images — these build brand awareness, true, but they are expensive, and risk irritating and possibly alienating potential customers.

There is an alternate approach that’s quickly grown in popularity. Current web darling Google, which is praised for its pin-neat interface (among other things), has long been leading the charge toward small, simple, text-only ads. These ads are set apart in their own table cell off to one side, shaded a different color so they stand out and are easy to notice without being annoying. They are cleanly delineated and out of the way of those who are not interested in them, but easily accessible to those who are. In this way they are presented as a resource, an offer of assistance, rather than a hard, insistent pitch.

Some other sites offering this type of advertising (referred to in some circles as “micro-ads”) simply deal them out from a pool willy-nilly, so that any time a page is viewed it will contain a different ad. Google’s ads, however, are tied into the site’s search engine functionality, synergized or “targeted” if you will, to improve their response rate dramatically.

The AdWords System

On Google, the text ads are made much more effective by precision targeting. Advertisers associate their ads with a couple of key words or phrases, so that a given ad is served only to people who are searching for related topics. The level of relevancy thus achieved is tremendously appealing to advertisers and consumers alike — often the ad is the very thing the searcher wants! This tight targeting leads to a dramatically increased click-through rate.

The other whopping advantage to these text ads is their minimal overhead. Whereas conventional web advertising requires contracts, representatives, deal making, file uploads, and all sorts of shenanigans, these micro-ads are entirely self-serviceable and self-maintaining. Advertisers basically just go to the “Place An Ad” or comparable page on the site in question, type in a couple of lines of copy and a target URL, and the campaign is launched. Ads appear on Google almost instantaneously after they are submitted.

Billing is calculated by the click rather than by the impression, with preferable placement given to ads with higher click-through rates. Since Google is getting your money only when somebody clicks on your ad, they want to maximize clicking. Ads that generate a lot of clicks are moved up in the hierarchy automatically, served more often and higher on the page than ads that are targeted to the same keywords but that generate fewer clicks.

The flipside of this is that the cost per click is calculated according to the keywords used to target the ad. Frequently requested keywords or phrases, like “britney spears”, cost more. Less popular phrases, like, say, “ralph macchio,” go for a few cents per click. This tends to work out relatively fairly:big companies advertising popular products or services can pay out of their deep pockets for popular keywords, whereas an independent special-interest site can attract like-minded folk without breaking the bank at 5 cents a click, that’s 200 new visitors for $10.

Implementing Your Own Text Ads

By now all you web builders are thinking, well, if Google can do it, why can’t we? Quite so. Chances are, text ads won’t prove to be a miraculous solution to the question Whither Advertising? for large, expensive sites. At the going rate, they probably won’t bring in enough revenue to support a web giant. But for independent, low-overhead places, they can be just the ticket. Here are some pointers to get you started serving text ads on your own site.

For a site that serves up dynamic content already, it’s pretty easy, and potentially lucrative, to write a bit of code and add in your own text ads. Because there are no images, server and bandwidth overhead is low, and because you’re already pulling your content from a database (or flat files, or whatever), adding a bit of code to pull in some ad text and display it is more or less trivial. The toughest part is building the mechanism to track ad impressions and clicks, and to bill your advertisers.

Tracking is made much easier if you set a flat rate, without elaborate sliding scales like Google’s. You’ll need a redirection script to track click-throughs:whenever someone clicks on an ad, they go to your script, which logs which ad was clicked, which page the user is coming from, the time and date, and any other data you desire, and then, instantly, invisibly, sends them on to the URL associated with the ad. With that, and another little script to rotate the ads, you’re all set. Those are very simple tasks and can be easily set up in Perl, PHP, or whatever you happen to be comfortable with.

But Let’s Talk Turnkey

If you don’t have the wherewithal for a coding project, even a small one, or if you don’t have a solid, dynamically driven content framework to build on, there are a number of existing turnkey and semi-turnkey solutions you can choose from. TextAds is a terrific open source PHP project that makes it easy to implement text ads on a site you host. Also, Idya offers an alternative system starting at $40.

Text ads are cheap, elegant, and easy to implement and to buy. They are an excellent way to make the web less ugly and pocket a little extra lettuce while you’re at it. What’s more, they’re a trendy design statement! Pretty soon, even sites that don’t feel like serving up real text ads won’t be caught dead without fake ones — pretty little squares off to the side, like windowboxes. Yeah! Everybody type after me:

Cost per click (CPC) is a method of charging advertisers for the user clicks their advertisements have received.

Cost per click is the going method for charging for targeted advertising, such as search ads, while cost per impression (CPM) is largely associated to branding advertisements, such as banner ads. Cost per acquisition (CPA) charges only for users who have committed a transaction or conversion.

CPM, or cost per thousand impressions, is the marketing world’s metric for judging the merits of different media buys.

Offline, CPM is calculated by taking the total cost of a given ad buy, dividing it by the total estimated viewership of a given advertisement, and multiplying the total by 1000. Here’s an example: You buy a magazine ad for US $5,000. The magazine’s subscriber base is 50,000. Therefore, the CPM will be ($5,000/50,000) x 1,000, or $100.

On the Web, CPM is a little different. Since it’s so difficult to accurately determine the total number of visitors to a website, the CPM is calculated using the number of actual ads served. The distinction is subtle, but critically important: in the offline world, marketers simply guess how many times an ad is seen, whereas on the Web, we know.

Creatives refer to an advertisements text or copy.

Advertising people are funny. They call magazines “books,” television “broadcast,” and advertisements “creative.” While the idea of calling ads “creative” may vary from ludicrously hopeful to woefully inadequate, when someone from the advertising world tells you they’ve been doing some great creative lately, what they really mean is “ads.”