Having smaller advertisers purchase online ads in a self-service interface isn’t new. Google AdWords launched in 2000 and has become the de-facto standard when small advertisers think of online advertising.

But this is actually a problem. Smaller advertisers don’t think to look anywhere else to advertise other than Google and when the adventurous do contact a web site’s direct sales force, they get an unpleasant surprise with the large minimum buys, unknown industry terminology and a process that isn’t catered for an ad-industry outsider.

This explains both the excitement that self-serve advertising technology has with web publishers for its revenue generating potential, but also the myth that by just making it available, “they will come” and purchase ads.

As with any early technology, promotion is key to educate your customers and to break through the myth barriers.

Last week, we had one of our largest clients create a promotion with their existing Shiny Ads self-serve advertising platform. They increased the clicks that their advertisers could purchase, but kept the price the same. At the same time, they promoted their “Advertising Sale” aggressively throughout their web site, including the home page, with eye-catching banners and buttons. They also upgraded their ‘Advertise Here’ page with more instructions on the process to get their advertisers more comfortable with the concept.

The promotion was a huge success, increasing their revenues, and more importantly, adding new 1st-time advertisers, who will return.

Because small advertisers don’t necessarily know that they can directly purchase advertising on your web site and they normally don’t visit your ‘Advertise Here’ page, you need to promote and educate to supercharge your direct self-serve advertising revenue.

By making small advertisers aware, educating them on the benefits and the process, and by giving them pricing options that work with their budget, your self-serve advertising revenue will become a major part of your overall online advertising revenue (along with your direct-sales and ad network revenue).

With the New Year among us, it is time again for another update on Shiny Ads.

We are happy to announce that a major feature upgrade has been launched in the last few days.

1) Doubleclick DART DFP ad server support; Along with OpenX, Shiny Ads now directly supports DART DFP for campaign and banner insertion and monitoring. Support for DART includes many of the pricing models previously available including CPM, CPC, CPD (except exclusive). In the next few months, we will be working on adding support for two other major ad server platforms. Also, we now support OpenX Enterprise Hosted.

2) Promotional Codes; Send a discount code to your best advertiser or to a disgruntled advertiser. In the “promotional codes” section, you can create one-time promotional codes with either a percentage discount or a fixed amount. While you can generate any number of codes, regular fees are associated with the final discounted amount.

3) Banner Templates; Banner Templates are a great way for you to have all of your advertiser’s banner look the same or give them an even easier method to build their banners. There are several built-in banner templates but you can also create your own.

4) System Uptime monitoring; In an effort to make our performance more transparent, the Dashboard section now displays Shiny Ads’ up-time in the last 30 days (currently at 99.87%).

5) Page Monitoring; Along with Google Analytics, we now support your own ComScore, Omniture SiteCatalyst, Quantcast, and Audience Sciences analytics monitoring codes on the Advertise pages.

6) Internal ad server statistics; If you are running of of our internal ad server, the Dashboard section will now list impression/click statistics per advertiser for the specified period.

Also, we are hiring a experienced sales person to lead our web publisher acquisition efforts. This person will be part of the executive team and be a key person in our funding process. If you of anyone, please send them our way.

And finally, one “small” change; we are finally out of BETA status. Thanks to all of those who gave us feedback and worked with us to handle defects. Although we are out of beta, please keep your feedback coming to support@shinyads.com.

For the last 3 weeks, our self-serve advertising interface has been asking advertisers specific questions about the ad purchase process. Shiny Ads has been metrics tracking in places for months now, but until now we didn’t know why users “dropped off” the sales cycle.

Today, we made available 3 key pieces of feedback so that our publisher can make the appropriate changes to their pricing and media kits and increase their conversation rates:

• Was there enough information in the media kit?
• Was the price reasonable?
• Was the pricing options easy to understand?

It has been a great month and half since we opened up Shiny Ads to our beta testers. Based on the feedback, we have expanded the functionality and of course fixed defects.

For example, we now support multiple pricing models. Different web publishers charge different rates for their ads. Some charge on a CPM (impressions), some on the number of days, and some on CPC (clicks) basis. Sometimes ads are exclusive: no other advertisement can be sold for days already purchased. We have also added support for a CPM bidding system that is similar to Google AdWords and gives a higher priority to ad purchases that come in at a higher CPM rate.