Previous: Setting up Tracking and Getting an Ad Server

Finding sites to purchase banner inventory on is the most exciting part for me.  The way I like to go about this is to get a campaign ready to go in Google’s Display Network fka the Content Network.  When you’re setting up the campaign be sure to find the option that says “Relevant Pages only on the placements and audiences I manage.”  I’ve included a picture below showing exactly what I’m talking about.

This way you’re only getting traffic from the placements you’re specifically targeting.  Now you can browse through the all the different sites you place your creatives.  You can narrow down the results by choosing your particular country, language, creative size and whether you want to place it on a site, video, RSS feed, etc…  If you already have a few sites in mind that you’re interested in, you can search by URL too, to see what placements they have available.

The good thing about Adwords is that it can be an ad server and tracker all rolled into one.  Mainly for simplicity and also because I’m lazy, I setup a pixel in Adwords and place it on the offer so I can optimize it based solely on the Adwords stats without having to compare stats between it and my Prosper202 install.  However, this is completely up to you if you’re worried about Google stealing your campaign data.

If you’re a little short on placements and are interested in finding other targets that may be beneficial to you, or may have cheaper traffic then I would suggest plugging in the URL’s you already have into Google Ad Planner, Alexa, Compete and Quantcast to find out where their traffic is coming from, where they are going after they leave and related sites.

Next: Contacting the Webmaster