Do all of the visitors to your Web site see your banner advertisements? This might seem like a stupid question, but it might have more relevancy to your situation than you think. In these modern days on the Web, everything has matured… including the way your ads are shown to your site’s visitors..Do all of the visitors to your Web site see your banner advertisements? This might seem like a stupid question, but it might have more relevancy to your situation than you think. In these modern days on the Web, everything has matured… including the way your ads are shown to your site’s visitors.
Under what circumstances might your ads not be shown? There are many reasons why your ads might not be properly displayed – some of these causes can easily be fixed while others are a little harder to fix.
Your ads will obviously not display properly to a visitor who has turned off image viewing through his browser controls; this problem is impossible to reverse because no images are shown. By using text link ads and ALT tags to describe your ad, the visitor with images turned off still has a chance to click on your ad, but he probably will not click any ads since adult material is mainly a visible form of entertainment, short of adult stories. Anyway, these people are not the ones we are looking to tease with our great banner ads.
Visitors using firewalls are also candidates for missing your advertisements. Most firewalls have a feature that can block ads. How is it possible for a piece of software to tell if an image is an ad or content? I’ll wait to answer that since we have yet to discuss Ad-Blocking software, but the good news is we can work around this problem, and trust me, we can defeat all the various forms of software designed to thwart our ads – it just takes a little creativity.
Let’s first set some default terms for what an ad is:
Banner Ad: 468 x 60
Half Banner Ad: 234 x 60
Island Ad: 250 x 250
Island Ad: 300 x 250
Premium Ad: 120 x 120
Skyscrapers: 160 x 600
Tower Ads: 120 x 240
These are the normal and standard banner sizes, and this is important information to know for the work around I’m about to share. I will warn you – when you hear how simple this is you might laugh, but most Webmasters I have talked with haven’t previously considered this option. Here it is:
Every time I place a banner ad on one of my sites, I do a little extra work to change the image size of my ads so that they don’t match and of the standard ad sizes listed above. Let’s say I want to use a 468 x 60 banner for a sponsor – I simply change this image through my HTML editor to another size. For example, I might change the image size to 471 x 61 instead – not enough to hamper the image quality, but enough to throw off the ad-blocking software packages. And yes, I told you this was as simple as picking your nose!
Does it work? Yes, every time! I have tested this technique on all of the ad-blocking software products on the market and they can not pick up the size-altered image as an advertisement. We want to tease our visitors, and we can only do this by showing them our banners. Let’s say twenty percent of your visitors are using a firewall with ad-blocking, or else an ad-blocking piece of add-on software, and let’s say you show banners at the standard 468 x 60 size… how many of this twenty percent will see your ad? Right, zero members of this group will see your ad.
So next time you want to do something to improve your site’s sales numbers, consider changing you banner ad size, because this is money we are talking about here.
I hope this small trick has been helpful and I wish all you adult Webmasters the best of luck with your ventures. Don’t give up! I have been there and know it takes hard work to succeed as an adult Webmaster, but it’s certainly possible!
Frank Jensen has been working with the Internet for the last seven years, and has mostly focused his energy on search engine traffic. Frank made the Submit4all.com Web site, which includes free advice on how to optimize adult Web sites for better search engine placement.
