I was with adsense for a long time and all they let you do is to put some blocks of ads on different places of your site. I joined the clicksor network recently and found out quite a few innovative ways of serving ads.
- The best way of serving ads and reaching the targeted audience is to serve ads which are displayed when the user rests his/her mouse pointer on a specific “targeted” word within the contents of the page. AdBrite and Clicksor, both of the providers have this kind of ad serving. The key point behind the success of this kind of ads is that the content itself becomes advertisements and it often helps people find what they are really looking for. If you visit my site, you will see some underlined (clicksor) and double underlined (adbrite) words. These words are the keywords chosen by the ad agencies. If you hover your mouse pointer over on any of them, a small block of ads will pop up floating over the texts. The advertisements are very contextual and highly relates to what people are reading on your site. It’s natural that these ads will attract more attention than those conventional ads.
- The MessageBox ads concept of Clicksor would attract much attention as well. These ads are served within a box that always docks itself onto the bottom of your browser’s canvas and no matter if you scroll or remain stationary, this box is always there, primarily minimized. It looks identical to the Vista GUI and seems like a minimized window since it has a button to maximize and another one to close. This style doesn’t bother your visitors, doesn’t require wasting space for advertisements blocks and the most important thing is that it tempts people into maximizing the box and clicking ads.
- I very much liked the idea of the clicksor box that pops into visibility when I hover my mouse over the banner ads from clicksor. It shows the weather report of my region and some other options which make the ad units user friendly. Since the traditional ads look very plain and dull, such interactions might trigger some additional “click through”s for a publisher.
- Additionally clicksor has another feature to imbed their video ads into some of videos on your site. This service is still in beta and I haven’t tested yet since I don’t publish videos on my site.
I believe that these new ways would help publishers to earn more revenues but I will have to wait to confirm the theory. I haven’t been publishing ads in these ways for long J