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What does a publisher need to do after an advertiser places an ad order?

There is money to be made by selling advertising on your website, but there is a whole lot more to the process than simply taking the money and uploading a banner. While ads can help your site, they can also have a negative effect if you don’t follow the proper steps after an advertiser has placed his/her order. Making mistakes means not only upsetting the regular visitors to your site, it also runs the risk of the advertiser pulling the order that they placed with you. Here are the steps that you need to follow after an ad order has been placed:

Review, inspect, and test the ad

This does not means simply making sure that the dimensions of the ad are the same as the ad space available on your pages. You need to make sure that everything displays properly on your site, and that the code is written in a way that will ensure clicking on the ad takes you where it is expected. The file size is also important, as larger ads can slow down the performance of your site, which will make your regular visitors unhappy.

Confirm and record ad payment

This is something that you and the advertiser should agree on before the ad goes live. Do you want a set rate for the ad, or are you looking for a payment that is performance based? An advertiser may want to go the latter route, as they may not like the idea of pre-paying for something without knowing what sort of results they are going to see. Either way, this is an agreement between the two parties that can be revisited on a regular basis.

Setup the ad in your ad server

Once you know that the ad specifications are satisfactory, you can enter the ad into the ad server. Once that has been done, you need to configure it to suit the specific needs of the advertiser. That could mean setting up quotas, making sure that the ad targeting like geographical targeting or demographic targeting have been added, and adding a start and end date if the ad is only being run for a specific amount of time.

Begin serving the ad

Once you have taken care of all three of the previous steps, you can start the ad serving on your site or app. Again, you will want to head back to your website and make sure that it is being properly displayed. Test a click and make sure it does to the right landing page and is recorded properly in the adserver.

Schedule reports for the advertiser

Every single advertiser is going to want to know how their ad is performing, and that means you need to create a way for the advertiser to view their ad stats and performance. This means creating access for the advertiser on the ad server, and setting up the reports in a way that covers all the data and details that are important to the company that is advertising on your site. Communication is key and you want to make your advertisers happy.

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