Ad rotation

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Ad rotation is the practice of showing multiple advertisements in a single location on a web page. Ads may be rotated with each new page load, within a single page load, or both. Because the ads are placed in the same location, they are typically the same format.

Goals

Goals of ad rotation include:

  • Allow publishing sites to serve ads for multiple advertisers.
  • Keep advertising "fresh". If the ad never changes, users are more likely to ignore it.
  • For content-rich sites, increase exposure to advertising by showing multiple ads per page load instead of just one.

Software

Ad rotation software, known as ad rotators, commonly provide features such as the following:

Technical implementation

Technically, ad rotation can be accomplished in multiple ways. The three most common approaches are

client-side and service-based.[1]

With server-side ad rotation, the ad is selected on the server and the corresponding

HTML markup
is generated and then served.

Client-side ad rotation typically involves

AJAX
calls to the server.

Service-based ad rotation is similar to client-side ad rotation in that it typically involves placing a small amount of JavaScript in the web page, but the JavaScript calls against a

AdSense
service is an example of service-based ad rotation.

Types of rotating ads

Ad rotation is most often used with digital display advertising.[1] These ads are shown in a variety of web sizes with the most common being a medium rectangle (300px x 250px) and a leaderboard (728px x 90px). They can be static display ads, live banners, video ads or interactive ads.[2][3]

Common problems

Ad rotation can enable publishers to inflate ad impressions by rotating many ads on top of one another so that only the top ad is viewable yet advertisers are charged for the non-viewable ads. As an example, the ad rotator can load a static placeholder banner visible to the user but then make ad calls for other non-viewable banners ads in the background. Ad calls are requests for the ad that result in impressions when the ad is loaded. This strategy is against the TOU for Google’s Adsense ad rotation program.[4][5]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b "Ad rotation implementation"\" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2016-09-10.
  2. ^ "Size Ad Specifications" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2020-11-12.
  3. ^ "Supported ad sizes - Google Ad Manager Help". support.google.com. Retrieved 2021-09-25.
  4. ^ "About ad rotation settings - Google Ads Help". support.google.com. Retrieved 2021-09-25.
  5. ^ "Ad placement policies - Google AdSense Help". support.google.com. Retrieved 2021-09-25.