Once you have decided to enter the world of digital advertising, there are two ways to go about it. You can contact individual website owners, and ask to buy ad space on their sites, or you can choose one of the many online advertising networks.

Why Use an Advertising Network

An online advertising network is not just a glorified link farm. Instead, it is an online advertising company that will partner with you to create an internet marketing solution that suits your budget and your needs. In fact, among major brands, the use of ad networks is becoming the norm, for many different reasons.

Here are just a few:

• Extend your Reach. Using an online advertising service is an excellent way to broaden your audience. An established advertising network online for more than a year can help you find unique, diverse viewers by focusing not just on large portal sites, but on niche sites as well. In fact, it is the use of niche marketing that is singularly important, because those sites often have cleaner pages and a better connection to their target audience. Consider your own list of favorite sites or web bookmarks – like you, the average consumer has a list of bookmarks reflecting dozens of small sites that are part of their lifestyles and breed brand loyalty.

• Waste Not, Want Not. Because online advertising services work with multiple advertisers and individual websites. It has the ability to adjust the frequency of specific impressions by serving alternate ads or alternate impressions, which means that instead of a single user seeing the same advertisement on ten different sites, they will see different ads, never becoming annoyed or bored by coming across the same banner or text block 30 times in ten sites.

• Customization and Scalability. Working with online advertising networks provides you with scalability – allowing you to commit to fewer or more impressions, allowing you to divide your budget between different types of ads, and helping you maximize the effect of any rich media in your marketing solution. As well, an online advertising network can customize your campaign so that your ads will be shown at specific times of day, or on websites that target specific timezones.

The Top Ten Ads Network

There are a great many advertising networks doing business, and selecting one can be difficult. Here, then, is a brief overview of the top ten vertical ad networks. Most offer similar services, but some specialize in one thing more than another. They are listed in alphabetical order.

• Advertising.com is an extremely large online advertising network that may not be the best fit for a smaller-scale advertiser. They bundle CPA banners with low-rate CPMs, and tend to be extremely unpredictable. They allow pop-ups and pop-unders, and most standard IAB banner formats. Requires maintenance of a 0.20% click-through rate (CTR) and a minimum of 250,000 impressions per month.

• Burst Media is one of the older online advertising networks in operation, and has a reputation for being dependable but not particularly dazzling. They have a good reputation among advertisers who use their services to sell site-targeted ads. Their banner sizes include the tiny buttons that are not bought very often, as well as the more conventional styles, and pop-ups and pop-unders are allowed.

• Casale Media calls itself “the world’s fasted growing online ad network,” and presents itself in an extremely professional manner. Always highly recommended and well rated by its advertisers, this network sells targeted CPMs and real-time optimization. Publishers retain control over all campaigns. Their offered ad-units include 720×400 popunders, 120×600 skyscrapers, 300×250 rectangles, and 728×90 leaderboards.

• Doubleclick has been an active online advertising company since 1996, and caters to advertisers who want to use streaming media, and rich media ads, although they also offer more traditional ad-types. In addition, they have an affiliate program. They are well respected within the industry.

• Google isn’t just for searching the web any more. In addition to their famous AdWords program, which is scalable for smaller advertisers, they also over AdSense, SiteSearch and Websearch, the latter of which allows advertisers to add a Google search bar to their website. Results are shown with separate sponsored listings. They offer many banner sizes and operate mainly using targeted PPC plans. They have no minimum traffic requirement.

• Miva offers traditional PPC advertising as well as a proprietary product called pay-per-call. In addition they offer extremely user-friendly tracking engines that allow advertisers to see their keyword bids or calculate their ROIs at any time.

• Right Media offers three different ad exchange programs, scaled for the size of the company and campaign in question, most of which involve standard ad-units. In addition, they offer a product called Media Guard, which is sort of like an advertising-friendly antivirus and spyware detector.

• Tribal Fusion is probably the top online advertising network. They reach more than 104 million US users each month, and are partners with more than a thousand high quality sites. Their traffic is premium, and so are their prices.

• ValueClick merged with FastClick last year. Before that it was one of the very top online advertising networks, with more than 30,000 advertisers generating almost 4 billion monthly impressions. The network has fewer publishers now, and the number of monthly impressions is around 3 billion. Their primary marketing model is CPC, but they also offer CPM, CPC< CPA, and CPL solutions.

• Yahoo!’s publisher network is a direct competitor of Google, but the interface is not as intuitive. In addition to contextual, CPC, and CPM ad-units, Yahoo also offers ad placements on blogs.

Of these ten online advertising networks, Google is probably the best suited for small advertisers, with it’s lack of a minimum traffic requirement, and total scalability, with Yahoo a close second, but it is important to check out the website for each online advertising network, and confirm that their products and services are what you need, as well as making certain that they will work within your budget. Once you’ve done a tiny bit of research, you will be able to successfully use online advertising networks.