Previous: Guide to Buying Banner Inventory

Before you ever think about buying banner inventory on a website you will need to make sure you have a tracking platform ready to handle your traffic and an ad serving platform that can handle the amount of banner impressions you need to serve.

When it comes to tracking, most affiliates already have something in place.  Most affiliates already know about the Tracking202 Team’s releases.  They also have a couple legitmate competitiors now, BevoMedia and CPVLab.  CPVLab is definitely the way to go if you do PPV.  Tracking isn’t something you want to skimp on.  Do it right the first time and get a dedicated server.  I can’t tell you how many times I crashed shared hosting and even a VPS with my Prosper install when I was starting out as an affiliate because I wanted to skimp on costs.  Every time this would happen, I would be losing money until I figured out it was happening.  And this was all before I started buying banner inventory, thankfully.

The next thing an affiliate will need is an ad serving platform.  Not all affiliates have this in place, but its definitely something they should have ready when the time comes.  There most popular options out there are OpenX, Zedo and AdShuffle.  I only have experience with AdShuffle.  They’ve been able to handle all the banner impressions that I’ve needed, but I haven’t done any kind of massive amounts of traffic, yet.  I’ve read that they can handle large amounts of traffic, but again, I haven’t verified this.  During ASW in January 2010, I was talking with Ruck and was telling him I was getting started with media buys and he recommended Zedo to me and told me that’s what all the big display guys run.  Ruck introduced me to a VP over at Zedo and after talking to him, I decided Zedo was a little bit more extravagant than what I needed as I was just starting out with display.  With that said, anybody who is looking to get into display, I would recommend contacting AdShuffle.  The platform is a bit overwhelming at first, but they have manuals ready for you to read and their team is always willing to help.  They even give you a free 30-day trial to get used to their platform.  As I just mentioned their team will also walk you through anything you have a question about.  The best thing about AdShuffle is there are no monthly fees, the only thing you pay for are the impressions that are served and the pixels that are fired.

Next: Finding Sites to Buy Banner Inventory On