Image this: you’ve finally taken the big step of monetizing your website. And nothing has burnt down. Advertiser’s love it. You love it. Readers are loving the increased attention you can pay to the website, and you’ve moved to part-time at your day job. Things are going well.

But then one your advertisers ask to see their impression stats, or their click through, and another wants to change their creative’s size. Still another is saying the banners aren’t loading, and some users are complaining that the new advertisements are slowing down the website. You can’t focus on your content because you have to spend so much time fixing your ads. Your website is suffering. Everything is falling apart.

I mean, it’s a bit extreme. But that might be the kind of situation where you go looking for an ad server. You didn’t need it when you started, but you do now.

Getting an ad server is a big step for a website and, like any tool out there opens up new avenues for you to grow. We get asked all the time why you might need an ad server, so consider this a cheat sheet. There are more than five reasons out there, but these are the top ones:

1. Cheaper

Ad servers cost money and you are going to be paying a bill each month. But don’t let that stop you. If you take a step back and look at how much time it takes to manually place banners, replace them, make sure they appear, test compatibility, and estimate statistics, you’ll find a time sink that can take up to 8 hours a week. With an ad server, you can do all of this in twenty minutes. Even if your site doesn’t take much maintenance, having an ad server can turn an hour every couple days to a check in once a week.

Then there’s also the hidden cost of hosting and bandwidth. Using a cloud-based ad server allows you to reduce these costs, and then there’s the other benefit…

2. Increased Revenue

The other side of ad servers being cheaper to maintain is that they also increase your revenue. For every additional feature you can offer your advertisers, your impression value will increase. Especially when the features are things like targeting, weighting, or click fraud detection. Suddenly your CPM might double or triple what it used to be back when you were maintaining everything by hand.

3. Faster Performance

Asynchronous banners are a blessing. You could have the fastest web server in the world, but if your images are served inline, there’s no getting around their load. With asynchronous banners, suddenly you push it to the side. Your banners still load, everything still fits together, but now your page loads that much faster. Sometimes, your banners even load before everything else.

Pair this with a constantly maintained and updated ad server and you’ll never have to worry about the speed of your banners again.

4. Better Tracking

Now we get to ad metrics. Impressions, conversions, clicks, CTR, CPM, and a seemingly endless list of new ones coming out every month. Your advertisers want them, but suddenly Google Analytics isn’t cutting it, and their click-throughs aren’t matching yours.

Tracking statistics aren’t just a nicety anymore. Knowing how many people are seeing your banners, how many clicks you’re getting, and when it’s happening can help you redesign your website. Numbers aren’t just for advertisers, either. It’s key knowledge that can help you grow your website. And having your own tracking to show your advertiser leads to…

5. Greater Transparency

Advertising is about building relationships, and letting people in is one of the best ways. When looking at an ad server, you don’t just want a place that records statistics, you want one that surfaces them. An ad server has integration which allows third parties to also track their statistics – so you know that everyone is helping each other out.

There’s always more reasons

Make sure your ad server is like a fine wine: it gets better with age. At AdButler, we’re always adding new features and talking to our customers to determine their needs. The longer you’re with us, the more features you get. We also constantly innovating as our mission is to be at the forefront of our space. With AdButler, you know you’re in good hands.

Our list isn’t complete. Depending on your use case, you could add dozens of more benefits, like custom white labelling or dedicated customer support. The point is that an ad server, in the right hands, can be a great tool. Try it out, see if you like it. I bet you’ll never go back to inline images and guesstimated numbers.