Page Peel Ads – A Third Generation Onsite Advertising Method

October 13, 2008 by Butterfly Filed under: Banner

The different types of onsite advertising seen on the Internet so far since the

late 1990’s can be categorized into three distinct generations, the first of

which were banner ads as well as the first generation of popup technology.

The drawback to traditional forms of on page website advertising is that they

either quickly became bypassed by website visitors because they were easily

recognizable as ads, or they were too “in your face” and downright annoying,

which engendered the opposite to the desired effect, and could actually send

people away from your website.

Banner ads fit into the first example. Visitors know that these are ads, and so

they mostly ignore them. Popups, fly in ads, and hover ads fall into the second

category. These can annoy your visitors and put them off.

Further, the first generation of popups would open a new browser window either

over, or behind, your existing browser session. Most of these are automatically

blocked by the popup blockers that come by default on the toolbars of most web

browsers.

A second generation of popups came along referred to as dhtml popups. These do

not open a new window, but rather overlay either an image (for

note popups) or a

dynamic html frame over the existing browser session. Most of these cannot be

blocked, but some people are still put off by the intrusive nature of something

flying in or appearing over the text that they are trying to read.

So the challenge was to create an onsite ad that is genuinely interesting to

visitors, and that will generate results. Coinciding with the arrival of Web2.0,

a third generation of onsite advertising technology began to appear.

Corporations with large advertising budgets started experimenting with a new

form of on page advertising known as “peel pages” or “page peel ads”. Originally these were

created by advertising agencies and were only seen on high profile websites

which were expensive to advertise on. But in 2007, this technology became

affordable even for home based webmasters with the apparition of a handful of

do-it-yourself peel page ad packages priced below the $100 mark.

Page peel ads are now appearing on many websites for the simple reason that they

work. Unlike a popup, they are not “in your face” and do not block or detract

from the rest of the content on a webpage. They display a small animated peel ad

in either the top left or right corner of a webpage. This arouses curiosity for

web visitors. A high percentage are intrigued enough to hover their mouse

pointer over the peel, which then folds the page back to reveal the full ad or

message that the webmaster most wants the visitor to see. A high percentage who

do this will also go on to click the peel away ad because they are intrigued to

see what is behind the image. Those that don’t need only move their mouse

pointer away to another part of the webpage, and the peel away ad will roll back

to its original small curl position in the corner of the page, leaving the

visitor free to continue browsing the page they are on.

Visitors like interactivity with a website, and indeed this is one of the

cornerstones of the Web2.0 phenomenon.

Peel ads are actually flash animations, but most of the off-the-shelf packages

available don’t require you to have any

knowledge of flash to implement peel pages on your website. There are generally step-by-step instructional videos included

with these packages that will show you

which files to upload to your server, and all that is required to add to the

webpage itself is a small snippet of java code at the bottom of your page.

You can have the page curl appear in any one of the four corners on your

webpage, although usually the top left of right corner will bring the best

results because it is “above the fold”, which refers to the area of a webpage

that a visitor sees without having to scroll down. Many visitors will in fact

leave a webpage before scrolling down below the fold, which is why above the

fold advertising is the most effective position.

Further, some of the peel ad scripts allow you to rotate the ads that you display.

This will enable you to track and test which ad or graphic is converting best

for you. Alternatively, if you are displaying paid advertising, this will allow

you to display several advertisers’ ads concurrently.