By ToddLast week, we introduced a new feature, A/B testing. This week, we are introducing a few more new features detailed below, and have also made some small tweaks to our website’s design. One of the new features, Text + Description Ads, is especially exciting for us – it is the first time we have introduced an ad type other than the standard display (image) ads. As a company, one of our core goals is to help website owners (publishers) sell ads better. Providing publishers with the tools to sell multiple ad types is key to achieving this goal. Today’s release of the text + description ad type is milestone for us, it is a new tool for publishers to add to their monetization arsenal, and a new way for advertisers to diversify their ad campaigns. In addition, we will be adding other new ad types during this first quarter of 2010, so be sure to subscribe to this blog to keep up with what is going on at BSA.
Text + Description Ads
This ad type will be new for most advertisers and publishers. Having too many display ads on a website can make the site feel cheap, cluttered, and take away from the overall user experience. With text + description ads, advertisers have a new way of integrating their message into publisher websites, and publishers have a new way to monetize otherwise cluttered or unused space. The text + description ads will be sold at the normal fixed 30-day rate (the same way we sell display ads) and they will be served via JavaScript (i.e. we’re not selling these for SEO value). We encourage all publishers to add a text + description zone and spend some time customizing the look and feel of the ad so that it fits in with their website. To ensure that visitors to your site know that this is an ad, we have placed a small “Ads by BSA” piece of text below the ad unit. This text will link directly to your BuySellAds.com site detail page.
The look and feel of the text unit is up to you. Here is an example of what a single text ad can look like:
Private Zones
We often run into situations where we are creating a specific ad zone for an advertiser. Since we (or the publisher) are creating this zone for someone specific, we don’t want anyone else coming in and buying the zone. You would be surprised how quickly new ad zones are sold on our popular sites. So, we have added the ability to make a zone “private”. When you make a zone private, all you are doing is specifying a special passphrase that is appended to the URL that will show the private zone to anyone who has this special passphrase. It will not be shown on your site detail listing unless the passphrase is provided.
You can set a zone as private by adding a passphrase for the zone on the Add / Edit Zone page:
Improved Ad Code Styling
We have added “even” or “odd” and “ad1″, “ad2″, etc. classes to the ads displayed by our ad code. This will give publishers additional control over the styling of the ads on their website.
Here’s what the new classes look like in the ad code:
Design Tweaks
The launch of the new homepage a couple weeks ago set the foundation for more continuous improvements to our user interface. Included in this release was a slight redesign of the top nav (it’s a bit larger and more defined now) and the removal of images from our new button style (only seen on the homepage now) as well as the gradient in the header area of the website. We tip our hat’s to Google & StopDesign for their inspiring post on recreating the button element. Any time we can remove a few http requests is a win-win in our minds.
Check out the new, “crisper” looking navigation and button below. We have removed the background images from both and saved a few http requests:
As Always…
Thank you for your continued support of BSA. If you have feedback on the features above, or ideas for new features, please post below or email me personally: todd@buysellads.com
