Frequently Asked Questions - Advertising

Explore our frequently asked questions below to find out more about our advertising options.

Salient Magazine

Many publishers are offering sponsored content as an advertising option, is this something that you do?

Current policy prohibits the commission of advertorial work as we have a strong focus on editorial freedom. Whilst we understand that it is growing in popularity, our readers are also skeptical of subtle commercial influence and as a result it is not something that we offer.

We have created an advert on Microsoft Publisher, can we export as a PDF and send it through?

Unfortunately not. The quality specifications of a Microsoft Publisher PDF are not sufficient and it risks your ad looking blurry in the magazine. This applies to any ad created using Microsoft Word, Microsoft Paint or any other program which is not designed to create professional publications.

We recommend Adobe InDesign with secondary recommendations of Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator.

If you are unsure about the program you intend to use or the artwork you currently have, please get in touch.

We would like to place an advert but we do not have professional design software, can you put something together for us?

It is our preference that you provide the artwork however in instances where you are unable to create the artwork using the appropriate software or find a suitable freelance designer, there is a possibility that we can put something together for you for free.

If you send through your logo, any brand colours, examples of any previous design work and the information you would like included, then we may be able to put something together for you for free with the condition that it remains our intellectual property. This means that it can only be used by us for our advertising mediums.

If you decide that you want to use the artwork in another magazine or somewhere else, we ask that you reimburse us for the time taken to create the artwork.

Online Advertising

I don't understand what this 'retina support' is all about, can you explain?

We're passionate about making sure that your advert looks good on our site and part of that is ensuring that it appears crisp and clear on any screen that our sites may be viewed on.

A lot of our page-views come from mobile devices where the screen density is higher than that of a computer. You might notice that sometimes ads look a bit fuzzy on your mobile device compared to the other text on the page. The issue with having fuzzy ads is that they don't fit as seamlessly within the content and it also doesn't reflect well on your ad.

Without going into all the technological garble behind it, the simple fact is that supplying retina creatives (2x) enable us to show non-fuzzy ads on mobile. We're seeing better engagement with our mobile ads as a result and we encourage all clients to take advantage of it.

We recommend creating the adverts at the 2x size, exporting then down-scaling and re-exporting again. This will save you time and is a more efficient workflow.

If you want further clarification or assistance, we're happy to help!

I've booked online advertising but I can't see it on the site?

We often run multiple ads across our sites to ensure that users don't get bored of the same old ad. If you navigate within the site, you should see the ads change as they alternate on page load.

I've refreshed the page but I still can't see our ad?

If you refresh the page or change pages too quickly, you'll find that our spam filter kicks in. This basically means that our ad server thinks you are a bot or attempting to fraudulently skew our statistics.

As a result, it generally continues to show you the exact same ad every time you refresh or change page and any subsequent ads you see during your time on the site are not counted by our ad server.

If you think the spam filter has kicked in, you can reset this by closing the tab, opening a new one and navigating back to the site. If you move around the site like a user who is engaged in the content, the ads will change and your one should hopefully pop up!

In other instances, if for example you have booked 1000 ad impressions each week for multiple weeks, the ad server will try spread these impressions over the week period, however sometimes it might get a bit ahead of itself and not show your ad for a few hours or so because it's shown a bit more than it was supposed to.

What happens if a user has adblocking software enabled?

We've chosen to take a passive approach to AdBlock use as oppose to aggressively fighting it and giving our users an experience they don't want.

In the event that the user has some form of AdBlock enabled, ads are not shown and not counted. On our salient.org.nz site we do have a popup that asks users to disable AdBlock for the site, but they are not required to.

I've got my post-campaign statistics, how can I interpret them?

First and foremost we recommend comparing the CTR to New Zealand averages. For the ad sizes that we offer, the average sits around 0.03% - 0.04% (October, 2016).

The next step is to compare the CTR to any other advertising that is leading to clicks on your website to work out what is giving you a better return on investment.

Remember that if you have only purchased a small number of impressions (less than 10,000), then your CTR isn't going to be as reliable as if you had purchased a larger amount (upwards of 20,000). As a rule of thumb, the more impressions you purchase, the greater validity your CTR holds.