How to Select the Best Placements for Your Ads

Finding the right placements for advertising content has been a long-standing practice in the marketing world. Long before the internet, computers, and mobile devices, advertising agencies were tasked with identifying the placements that would result in the best exposure for their ad. And, while many agencies still practice conventional placement selection, finding the best location for your ad has become an essential step for most successful affiliates.

Despite the fact that ad placements are crucial, many marketers struggle to understand this concept and find the best locations. For this reason, we’ve put together an article on how to select the best placements for your ads.

Learning How to Identify Good Placements

As you may already know there are many differences between traditional adverts and online ads. Understanding these distinct characteristics will allow you to locate, bid on, and obtain the best placement for your affiliate ads.

In traditional advertising, good placement opportunities are visible and allow marketers to get creative, very much like a large billboard. Online ads, on the other hand, are not that simple.

Instead of choosing an online ad based on its location on a page, size, or shape, you need to think like a consumer. Non-conventional placements, which refers to areas that don’t usually contain ads, tend to work best in affiliate marketing. Make sure that your creatives are appropriately sized for the placements you select. 

Finally, you need to take the page’s context into consideration. For instance, if you are marketing power tools, you’ll want to place your ads on a website that talks about home repairs, DIY projects, and similar topics.

How to Select the Best Placements for Your Ads

Affiliate networks and similar platforms use live bidding models and other elements that will help decide whether you get a placement or not. However, getting a good placement goes beyond making the right bids. Learning how to identify good placements takes a deep understanding of several factors, including offer types, traffic sources, and other elements.

Here are six tips to help you choose the best placement for your affiliate ads.

Consider the Value of Impressions

Impressions have lost value in the eyes of marketers due to the development of new ad formats. However, getting in front of your target audience is still a great way to build a long-lasting connection. When evaluating placements, don’t pass up a spot simply because it provides mostly value through impressions. If the price is right, you could get some decent results by choosing banners and similar locations – as long as they are placed on quality sites.

Look Out for the Chance of Exclusive Placements

Exclusive placements are not usually awarded by publishers or networks. In most cases, you have to create an “exclusive” placement through roadblocking. In simple terms, roadblocking is the practice of taking up all the placements on a page so that a visitor only sees ads from your offer, effectively pushing out competitors at the same time.

Stay Relevant to the Page’s Content

Relevance is crucial at every level, especially when it comes to placements. As we mentioned before, your ads should follow a similar theme to the page they’re located on. If you are promoting female lingerie on a travel and camping website, you’re probably going to have a poor performance. However, if you promote hiking boots, light waterproof gear, and similar equipment on the same site, you are more likely to see positive results.

Picture Your Ads in the Spaces You Want 

Unless you want to work on a set of creatives from scratch, you’ll need to envision your ads in the spaces you are interested in. Recycling ads (with some editing, of course) can save you a lot of time and resources. But, this will only be possible if you keep your creatives in mind when shopping around for spots.

Or, Optimize Your Ads for Those Spaces

If you don’t want to work on a new set of ads, but you want to go for spaces that don’t necessarily fit your old creatives, you can always meet halfway. You can try to find an alternative that requires some ad optimization, but will still be faster than creating your new ads. For example, if you’ve worked in the nutra industry, you can opt for offers that market similar products, thus allowing you to use the same base images.

Consider Factors Like Demographics, Time of Day, and GEO

Geographic location, the time of day that your ads run at, and other elements will also affect the performance of your placements, so keep these in mind when doing your research.

Find Out More About Boosting Your Ads’ Performance

Get in touch with ActiveRevenue to learn how to boost your ads’ performance and build better campaigns today!