We have a couple small updates to tell you about today.

Facebook fan count

We noticed that publishers have been actively building up their following on Facebook, and many of them have a very impressive following. Facebook fan pages have become yet another extension of a website and online brand. Therefore, it only makes sense for us to include Facebook fan counts as part of the public stats section on publisher buy now pages. To add your Facebook fan count to your buy now page, go to the Publisher Dashboard > Edit Site, and add your fan page URL. Go back to the Publisher Dashboard, click on “update stats” and your fan count will appear on your buy now page.

The hat tip for this idea goes to Adriana of Scene360. Thanks Adriana!

Tweet This

To help promote ad space, publishers will often tweet links to their BSA buy now page. When done in moderation, this can be a great way to make sure your Twitter followers are aware of the ad space for sale on your site. We wanted to make this easier for publishers by providing a shortened link for each buy now page. On the Publisher Dashboard, each site has its own http://bsa.ly/[key] link that goes to the buy now page and a link to tweet about it.

As always, if you have any feedback, please don’t hesitate to send me an email: todd _at_ buysellads.com (attn: spam bots – I know my _at_ trick won’t fool you, but it makes me feel better).

Yes, real-time

We’re proud to announce that the ad analytics in your BSA accounts are now real-time. What this means is that the stats update within a minute or two of when the impression or click occurred. This new release of our stats collection and parsing process is a significant upgrade to our infrastructure. In the coming weeks (and on an as-needed basis moving forward) we will be plugging in additional stats collection servers to this new setup. And, naturally, the distribution of these servers will be somewhat strategic in their geographic location, allowing us to improve the response time (even as little as 10 milliseconds is a big deal to us) of our stats tracking pixel.

So, what does this mean for BSA users?

It’s very simple. Advertisers get real-time access to ad performance stats. Publishers also get that same real-time access to ad performance stats. And, more importantly, your ads/website will load faster as we continue to distribute the tracking pixel geographically.

Questions, concerns? Please ask below in the comments or send me an email personally to todd _at_ buysellads.com.

In geek-speak, asynchronous is a heavenly term. Nearly all advertisements on a website are served using JavaScript from a third party ad network provider. When any browser downloads the ad code that displays the ads, it blocks everything else on the page from rendering. And, while this process may take less than a second of the user’s time, it is noticeable and it is a big problem.

Remember the day Michael Jackson passed away? Several news websites were crushed by the traffic and crashed. It wasn’t because the news websites could not handle the traffic; it was the ad networks blocking ad code that slowed things down. It is a known fact that ad networks are a key bottleneck when it comes to website performance. We decided that it was time for some innovation in ad code delivery methods, and are proud to announce our new non-blocking, and truly asynchronous JavaScript ad code.

If the major ad networks like Google AdSense, Yahoo! Network, AOL Advertising, as well as the popular ad serving products such as Google AdManager and OpenX converted their ad code to be non-blocking, the internet as a whole would become an order of magnitude faster. I genuinely hope that the larger ad networks will step up to the plate and follow our lead on this. A faster internet is a happier internet. This is a big deal.

Why is this a big deal?

Speed
Plain and simple: your website will load faster for your visitors. JavaScript is a performance burden on your website. It blocks additional resources in the page from downloading and blocks elements below from rendering (see Steve Souders Loading Scripts Without Blocking article for more info).  It has also been rumored that site speed may soon affect Google page ranking.

Better Data
It is generally accepted that ad networks will report slightly different impression level data than your website analytics software. There are a variety of reasons for this. Slow or partial page loads is one of these reasons. Faster ad code means fewer slow or partial page loads and therefore better data.

Why should you care?

Let’s face it, ad networks slow down the internet.  Since online advertising is part of our livelihood it is important for us to do what we can to make online advertising less evil. Making websites load faster is important.

How can you get the new snippet?

Login to your BuySellAds.com account and go to your Publisher Dashboard. Click on the “get ad code” link for each of your ad zones and follow the instructions on that page. The main snippet below will need to be installed right after the opening <body> tag:

<!-- BuySellAds.com Ad Code -->
<script type="text/javascript">
(function(){
  var bsa = document.createElement('script');
     bsa.type = 'text/javascript';
     bsa.async = true;
     bsa.src = '//s3.buysellads.com/ac/bsa.js';
  (document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0]||document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0]).appendChild(bsa);
})();
</script>
<!-- END BuySellAds.com Ad Code -->

Then, for each ad zone, you will need to install the following snippet where you want the ads to appear. Note: this snippet will be unique for each ad zone, please get the appropriate snippet from the “get ad code” page for your ad zone (this link is on your Publisher Dashboard):

<div id="bsap_[zone]" class="bsarocks [sitekey]"></div>

Important: If you install the new version of the ad code, you MUST install it for all of the ad zones on your site. If you don’t, there is a chance for a race condition here and there if the bsa.js asynchronous ad code has not downloaded by the time the browser tries to render each zone.

Of course, your current install of the BSA ad code will work just fine, but it’s in your best interest to upgrade to the new BSA ad code install to reap the performance improvement. This async install of the BSA ad code is now our default install and we will be working to encourage publishers to make the change until we can phase out the legacy version 100%.

Special Thanks

We would not be “clued-in” to techniques and methods for doing this without the work of Google Evangelist and YSlow creator Steve Souders. His book High Performance Web Sites is a must read, and we also suggest keeping up with his blog: http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/ – there is a wealth of information there now, and he will be publishing some posts in the coming weeks on 3rd party content (ads, widgets, analytics) that I am sure will be valuable.  Steve was also kind enough to take a look at our snippets before todays release.

header image copyrighted by Roland

Last 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