Creating Alternate Ads for AdSense and Clicksors

(originally published in the Possibilities ezine)

PPC ads like Google AdSense and Clicksor are a great source of income for many web site publishers.

You sign up and put the ads on your web sites. They deliver the ads live, with each page load — ads relevant to the content of the page the ads are delivered to. (Well, sometimes they aren't so relevant, but they try.)

The ads are delivered from the inventory of ads they have available.

What happens when no ads are available depends on the PPC ad distributor. AdSense delivers non-profit (non-paying) ads. I don't know what Clicksor does.

Both of those organizations, however, allow you to specify content to display whenever they don't have sufficient relevant ads in their inventory. Instead of their ads, they display your ads.

This article will show you step by step how to make those alternate ads so they fit within the space allotted for the PPC ads.

You'll be able to deliver your own ads, paying ads or your personal selection of non-profit ads, whenever AdSense or Clicksor inventory runs out.

Step 1 —

Create a web page that will contain your ad. A style in the head area should specify zero margins.
Here is an example:

The ad on the web page can contain any content a normal web page could contain — text, images, Java, forms, and so forth — so long as it fits within the allotted ad space.

I'll show you an easy way to tweak for the fit.

Step 2 —

Make a separate, temporary web page to be used for tweaking the ad web page. The temporary web page will contain an iframe tag, which is the "secret" for quickly and easily adjusting the content on the ad web page.

The iframe tag is the same dimension as the allotted ad space. Let's assume a 250 x 250 square space for our example:

The iframe has a border so it's easier to tell how much more space the ad web page can occupy, or where the excess content is cut off.

Put your ad page URL in the src attribute (in place of http://example.com/adpage.html).

Adjust the width and height when designing ads of different sizes.

(This temporary web page may be kept on your computer's hard drive, handy for when you want to tweak the size of another web page ad.)

Step 3 —

Load the temporary web page into your browser. The ad web page will load into the iframe.

Adjust the ad web page as needed until it fits nicely in the iframe. Test in various browsers, especially the two most popular ones, IE and Firefox. Different browsers render content a bit differently, even when CSS styles are used.

Step 4 —

Upload the ad web page to your server and make a note of its URL.

Step 5 —

Tell the PPC ad distributor the URL of your alternate ad web page. This is done by specifying the URL in the JavaScript code that delivers the ad.

The following apply as of this writing, 17 June 2006.

AdSense:

For AdSense ads, the ad web page URL can be specified when you generate the ad code. The URL will then appear in the generated JavaScript between the quote characters of this line:
google_alternate_ad_url = "";

Clicksor:

For Clicksor ads, put the URL of the ad web page between the single-quote characters of this line:
clicksor_default_url = '';

If the line isn't in the code obtained from Clicksor, it can be inserted.

Ads of Different Sizes

Make an alternate ad web page for each PPC ad size on your web site.

Once set up, you can display ads that make you money even when the distributor is out of inventory.

Will Bontrager
Copyright 2006 Bontrager Connection, LLC