What is an Ad Network and How To Use Them
Introduction
If you are an affiliate marketer or a website owner, then looking for ways to reach a wider audience and boost your online presence is a constant in your marketing strategy.
Enter Ad Networks.
I am sure you will have heard the term “Ad Networks” but what is an Ad Network and how can they benefit your business?
In this post, I will dive into the world of Ad networks, and explore their role in the digital advertising landscape and how you can profit from them.
All affiliate marketers need traffic to their websites or landing pages.
But there are still a good number of people who don’t fully understand what ad networks are and how they work, and how they fit into the need for traffic.
Whether you’re looking to increase brand awareness, generate leads, or drive conversions and sales for your campaigns.
By the end of this post, you will have an understanding of how to choose the right ad network for your business and how ad networks can help you reach your advertising goals.
So, if you’re ready to take your online advertising strategy to the next level.
Let’s get at it!
What is an Ad Network?
In its most simplistic terms, an Ad network is a platform that connects advertisers with publishers.
Typically they provide the technology and tools required to track clicks, conversions and therefore commissions.
By using an ad network, advertisers can reach wider audiences and publishers can monetise their traffic without having to negotiate individual partnerships with advertisers.
So, for publishers, (the website where the ad is placed), this ensures that the owner of the website gets paid the agreed amount every time someone clicks on an ad that is placed on one of their pages.
This means that for a high-traffic website, there exists a great opportunity to monetise the traffic they receive.
For Advertisers, when a user (visitor to the website) clicks on one of their ads, depending on the desired outcome of that click, the advertiser will be paid a commission by the company whose product it is the ad refers to. (The affiliate commission).
This means that for an advertiser, to be present on a high-traffic website, that has trusting and ready-to-buy visitors the chances of success are vastly increased.
The Reasons You Need to Know About Ad Networks
If you are an affiliate marketer and are not familiar with Ad Networks, then getting to the bottom of why you should be, and what it means in monetary terms is pretty important.
The skills involved in using one can significantly improve your bank balance.
Ad Networks:-
-
- Save Time
- Provide Easy Access to Markets
- Penetrate Markets Otherwise Unavailable to You
- Make Budgeting Easier
- Provide Valuable Data
- Increase Targeting Options
As already mentioned Ad Networks work with both publishers and advertisers.
Where the publishers are the website owners who host the ads, and advertisers are the affiliate marketers, ad agencies etc who place the ads.
For this post, we are concentrating on Ad Networks from the advertiser angle.
Piece by Piece Ad Networks
More precisely then, what do Ad Networks offer you as an affiliate marketer?
Principally, they are offering you a route to market. They do this by breaking down into small chunks all the available ways there are to penetrate a market.
They offer you different types of ads to choose from and then what quality of placement.
Once you have started a campaign their next job is to deliver you a raft of data.
This data allows you to determine which parts of your campaign are working and perhaps more importantly which bits are not, thus providing more profits for your campaigns.
All sounds pretty simple, right?
Well, not so much. There are a number of things you need to consider, decide on and prepare before all this happens.
Pre Campaign Considerations
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- Which Product?
- Market/Audience Research
- Competition Research
- Which Network to Use
- Creative (Ad) Production x 4 at least
- Landing Pages Ready
- Email Capture Ready
- Funnell Ready
- Budget Established
For the sake of this article, I am going to make the assumption that everything in the above list is covered. You can read more about the list here.
Generally, although different networks vary in what they offer, the list below lays out how an ad network breaks down the targets for you to choose from.
For each campaign, you will not necessarily need all of them and the more complex you make it the more expensive it can become and the harder it is to analyse the data that follows.
So when you are starting out stick to the basics and don’t overcomplicate things.
The Main Categories Are:
GEO Ad Format
Platform. Device
Browser/OS. Carrier
Time of Day Creatives
Audiences Retargeting
Interests. Age
Gender Others
GEO
Before starting a campaign your research should have told you where (geographically) you will be promoting your product.
The GEO is the country/state you are targeting, this means that all your ads will only be placed in that geo. 
TIP: Certain Countries and States do not allow
certain products, for example, gambling is not legal online in some countries or states so be sure to target geos that allow your product.
Ad Format
There are numerous ad formats that you can use in a campaign, the main ones are, on-click (pop-under), push, in-page push, banner and interstitial.
Which one you choose will depend on the type of creatives you have developed, or expect to use for your campaign.
TIP: Ensure that the ad format you use can be used on all the devices and platforms that you will be targeting.
Platform/Device
There are usually only two choices here which are desktop or mobile.
Depending on your choice of ad format you could choose to target only one or the other or both.
TIP: According to Google consumer insights 40% of purchases are made with a mobile, so it is important that your targeting will reach both Android and iOS devices.
Browser/OS
Closely related to the Platform and device category is which browser and OS to target.
You will need to make sure you get value for money here, targeting something like a Windows phone is probably not going to help you much, but you will surely want to include Windows as an OS.
TIP: Bear in mind that choosing too many options here (and there are a lot to choose from!) may cloud the data you get back. The data will tell you what is working, and you can quickly remove those that are not. So start broadly and trim down quickly to save money from your budget.
Carrier
This category might seem a bit odd but is nonetheless worth some consideration.
You can target just 3G/4G and 5G networks or combine them with broadband/wifi. Generally speaking, you would want to target them all if you apply this category.
TIP: There are instances where you may want to only target mobile data or only broadband/wifi, there is an argument that says that if someone is on wifi then they are more comfortable and more likely to respond.
Time of Day
Time of DayThe world has lots of time zones and making sure that you are getting the most value from your budget means being accurate about what time your ads are running.
Research in this area varies but there are some commonalities that point towards the time of day and what day of the week to run ads depending on your industry or niche.
TIP: Every time you run a campaign you can glean data that tells you what time of day users are interacting with your ads, use this data in a simple spreadsheet to pinpoint the time of day and what days to run your ads.
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Creatives
Your creatives or ads need to be prepared in advance if possible, having a clear idea of your target audience will determine what they look like and their content.
You should in most cases when starting a campaign have at least 4 creatives to add, this gives the opportunity to ‘split test’ those creatives and see which one does best.
TIP: Whilst you really need at least 4 creatives for your campaign in the test phase, be prepared to find out that none of them is working! Try to have some alternative-themed ones ready to go, just in case.
Audiences
This one can sometimes be a bit confusing.
By audiences generally speaking this is referring to the consumers that the ad network will send your ads to.
However, as you build your business you will acquire data that can be specifically used in an ad campaign.
TIP: Here again the value of all the data you collect from your campaigns is an invaluable commodity, so don’t be afraid to make good use of it.
Retargeting
Retargeting is sometimes combined with or regarded as the same thing as audiences depending on the network you are using.
Retargeting is normally regarded as directing ads to users who have already interacted with your previous ads, for example, they visited your website or offer/landing page.
TIP: There may well be some cross-brand opportunities here so think of the audience data you collect as possibly useable for a similar product on another campaign.
Interests
This category has very wide choices and can be one of your most valuable targeting choices.
Interests are pretty much joined into broad groups where ad networks are concerned, and this is probably a good thing as a list that takes too long to choose from is probably going to result in some wasted budget.
TIP: A little lateral thinking here may well bring some unexpected results, choose sports and you may also want to include shopping as they both go together, shopping is not just about food!
Age
This one is all about your market research.
The age group of your potential customer is an absolute must-know when launching your campaigns, otherwise, you will be spending huge chunks of your budget addressing the wrong people.
TIP: You need to be thinking as far back as when you picked your product and who specifically you want to sell it to, this way all your research is directed at the right audience from the beginning of your planning.
Gender
This category is exactly the same as Age, it’s all about the research.
You should be fully aware based on the product you are promoting whether you 
need to target males, females or both.
TIP: You may well have intended a product to be promoted to only one gender, there are many instances where in split testing it will become clear that it is possible to get a spin-off product that is for the opposite or both.
Others
Depending on your choice of ad network, you may well be presented with other options than those in the above categories.
These might include:- Browser Language, OS Language, Zone Limiting, and States within Countries, to name but a few.
You may not want to use all of them but something like languages if you are going for a specific local market will be of course be a key factor.
Other Things to Consider
As you have seen then, ad networks are a very powerful tool in the armoury of an affiliate marketer.
Their ability to target audiences with a precision that would be difficult to replicate is, without a doubt, one of the best things you can adopt to your marketing strategy.
There are of course other routes to market for you to consider.
Starting a YouTube channel is free, but monetising it can take up to 12 months or more, and there is no guarantee that YouTube will grant you access to the monetisation program.
Any of the social media platforms can be utilised to provide free traffic, but getting traction is hard.
Tracking your success on social media is not always as accurate as you would like it to be, if you have ever used Facebook ads manager you will know all about this.
Cranking it Up a Notch
Using an Ad Network to promote your products is a serious business. It’s not free but the results can be spectacular.
But what happens if you want to use more than one network?
It is quite possible that you have a diverse range of products which means you need to use more than one network because some products can’t be promoted on certain networks.
So now you have data all over the place, different networks all with different reporting, the solution is a Data Tracker.
What is a data tracker then? Data Trackers are platforms that provide a bridge between ad networks and other advertising mediums and the data they collect.
A Data Tracker integrates with platforms like ad networks and brings all your data into one easily manageable place.
It might be a bit in the future if you are just starting out but this is another powerful tool for affiliate marketers that save you enormous amounts of time.
Alternative Methods
What are the alternatives if you don’t choose to use an ad network?
As noted above there are social media platforms that allow you to post what are effectively ads for free, and the traffic to your offer may well be genuine but I would suggest more in curiosity than with intent to purchase.
The only other real alternative available to you is to start a Blog, fill it with value-adding content, get it ranked on Google and then take advantage of the traffic that arrives with the use of affiliate links in the content.
Blogging really is a good way to encourage people to your website but I want to say that it takes time. A good blog and its content with a lot of planning and work will eventually yield excellent results.
As an affiliate marketer, it is probably the best place to start as it provides a website, hosting and all the other basic tools you need to promote products, so give it some thought.
Wrapping Up Ad Networks
By now it will be pretty obvious that I am an advocate of using ad networks, but getting your traffic organically from search engines using your blog or other means is still very valuable.
It is fair to say that you really should be doing both, getting organic traffic and paying for it.
Starting with your blog or preferred website method, provide good content that adds value to the reader, get it indexed on Google and work on getting good backlinks that validate you as an authoritative information source.
Once your blog is established you can then lead into some affiliate links with products or companies that you want to promote in your chosen area of business and start to make a little cash.
As you move along you can determine what is the right point for you to jump into using ad networks.
If you do enough product and ad network research then you may choose to get right at it, and that’s ok but please bear in mind that learning the ropes has a cost attached to it.
Be sure that you have the budget to complete a full cycle for a campaign, there is nothing worse than starting to see some positive results and then running out of budget!
All in all ad networks can without a doubt bring about financial benefits to an affiliate marketer, but remember they are just tools, and to be a master craftsman you need to know how to use them properly.
This post will have helped you get your head around the basics of ad networks I hope you found it of value and I wish you the best in your affiliate journey
James