There are various ways to implement ad tags from Gourmet Ads. The first is our preferred method of hard coding them to the site directly. The second is running them through an ad server or via a CMS plugin (for most sites, running an ad server is unnecessary).
Hard coding your ad tags
If you’re not familiar with what hard code or hard coding means, it involves taking the ad tags (Javascript Code) we provide you and saving them directly into the site or dynamic site template.
Advantages for Publishers when ad tags are hard coded
We highly encourage all Gourmet Ads Publishers to hard code our ad tags. Here’s why:
1. Roadblocks
This allows Gourmet Ads to sell your site as part of a roadblock campaign, thus producing higher revenue opportunities for Publishers. Generally speaking, roadblocks pay the highest CPMs. It also allows us to send the campaigns live almost instantly because there is nothing to change on the page. In short, we can’t include your site in a roadblock campaign without hard coded tags.
2. Rich media, beyond the banner and high-impact units
In the same vein as roadblocks, rich media units, beyond the banner and high impact units can only be run by hard coding our ad tags to your site. Depending on the advertising creative, we’ll also need to create a 1×1 ad tag to run in the footer of the site.
3. Contextual targeting
Hard coding your ad tags, allows us to contextually target your content quickly and easily from our ad server. So if your page is about your famous chicken recipe, then we’ll know we can serve a chicken ad on your page and provide contextual relevance for advertisers, thus increasing the value of your website.
4. Globally monetize your website
Gourmet Ads offers all publishers the ability to monetize your website globally. By hard coding your ad tags to the page, by default you’re selling in all geographies instantly Your food site might be aimed at people in New York, but these days people from around the globe are interested in your content. There is no reason to serve these audiences a house ad or blank ad. We’ll find an advertiser in that country to serve an advertisement on your site.
5. Prevents discrepancies due to iFrames
iFrames cause a great deal of issues for advertisers. Frequently, iFrames prevent advertising creative from running correctly, other times they prevent auditing process to count ads or the Publishers website address causing discrepancies. By implementing our Javascript ad tags directly onto the page we rarely see discrepancies.
6. Reduces load time of your site
By hard coding our ad tags to your site, you cut out the time a third-party ad server takes to load the ad. We spend a lot of money each year on ad servers to make sure our ads deliver to your site at lightning speed. Third-party ad servers and CMS plugins can offer great features but they are really unnecessary for sites which are not at the enterprise level.
7. Accurate measurement
When allocating campaigns we’re always looking for the most accurate number of impressions a site will run. By hard coding our ad tags we’ll accurately measure every impression each day, thus knowing your exact audience and traffic numbers. So, when our ad operations team is allocating impression levels for campaigns we’ll know we can deliver the campaign in full.
8. Categorization by deeper ad server integration
We mentioned above the advantage to run contextually-targeted campaigns for sites that hard code our ad tags. In the same vein, there are significant advantages for large sites that hard code our ad tags to achieve deeper ad server integration by dynamically parsing keywords into the ad tags. For example, on a guacamole recipe page, the website could parse the words “Mexican recipe” allowing an advertiser to target all Mexican recipes on a website. This sort of food category targeting is much sought after by advertisers and to make sure it works every time requires the ad tags hard coded.
9. Easily deploy website zones
Once again, only for larger/enterprise sites, there is a clear advantage to set up website zones by hard coding ad tags onto the site. They could be homepage, search pages, recipe pages, etc. Some advertisers only want to run on the homepage of a site, others like run-of-site. Setting up website zones us the flexibility to only target particular zones the advertiser requests.
10. Reduce ad serving problems
One of the most important reasons for hard coding our ad tags is to prevent problems and unnecessary troubleshooting. Our ads tags are thoroughly tested and run on hundreds of sites. In cases when a Publisher has an issue with advertising not displaying, it’s a configuration issue due to an ad server or CMS plugin. When issues do arise, the first thing we’ll ask you to do is to hard code the ads to the site.
