Ad rotation is the practice of showing multiple

advertisements Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to put a product or service in the spotlight in hopes of drawing it attention from consumers. It is typically used to promote a ...

in a single location on a web page. Ads may be rotated with each new page load, within a single page load, or both. Because the ads are placed in the same location, they are typically the same format.

Goals

Goals of ad rotation include: * Allow publishing sites to serve ads for multiple advertisers. * Keep advertising "fresh". If the ad never changes, users are more likely to ignore it. * For content-rich sites, increase exposure to advertising by showing multiple ads per page load instead of just one.

Software

Ad rotation

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...

, known as ad rotators, commonly provide features such as the following: * image management * display weighting to control the ''frequency'' and ''duration'' of individual ads * reporting, allowing advertisers to see how often ads were displayed and clicked * for service-based ad rotation, management features such as color selection, filtering competitor ads, channel selection (content, video, search, etc.) and payment management

Technical implementation

Technically, ad rotation can be accomplished in multiple ways. The three most common approaches are

server-side In the client–server model, server-side refers to programs and operations that run on the server. This is in contrast to client-side programs and operations which run on the client. General concepts Typically, a server is a computer applicati ...

client-side Client-side refers to operations that are performed by the client in a client–server relationship in a computer network. General concepts Typically, a client is a computer application, such as a web browser, that runs on a user's local comp ...

and service-based. With server-side ad rotation, the ad is selected on the server and the corresponding

HTML markup An HTML element is a type of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) document component, one of several types of HTML nodes (there are also text nodes, comment nodes and others). The first used version of HTML was written by Tim Berners-Lee in 1993 ...

is generated and then served. Client-side ad rotation typically involves

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

of some sort (either straight

client-side JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, often ...

or else

AJAX Ajax may refer to: Greek mythology and tragedy * Ajax the Great, a Greek mythological hero, son of King Telamon and Periboea * Ajax the Lesser, a Greek mythological hero, son of Oileus, the king of Locris * ''Ajax'' (play), by the ancient Gree ...

calls to the server. Service-based ad rotation is similar to client-side ad rotation in that it typically involves placing a small amount of JavaScript in the web page, but the JavaScript calls against a third-party service that provides its own management interface for specifying ad delivery options. Google's

AdSense Google AdSense is a program run by Google through which website publishers in the Google Network of content sites serve text, images, video, or interactive media advertisements that are targeted to the site content and audience. These adver ...

service is an example of service-based ad rotation.

Types of rotating ads

Ad rotation is most often used with

digital display advertising Digital display advertising is online graphic advertising through banners, text, images, video, and audio. The main purpose of digital display advertising is to post company ads on third-party websites. A display ad is usually interactive (i.e. ...

. These ads are shown in a variety of web sizes with the most common being a medium rectangle (300px x 250px) and a leaderboard (728px x 90px). They can be static display ads, live banners, video ads or interactive ads.

Common problems

Ad rotation can enable publishers to inflate ad impressions by rotating many ads on top of one another so that only the top ad is viewable yet advertisers are charged for the non-viewable ads. As an example, the ad rotator can load a static placeholder banner visible to the user but then make ad calls for other non-viewable banners ads in the background. Ad calls are requests for the ad that result in impressions when the ad is loaded. This strategy is against the TOU for Google’s Adsense ad rotation program.

References