PPC vs PTR

Holidays and the impact to PPC Advertising?

2008-12-26T12:04:00.000-08:00

For those using PPC in the U.S, are you running your campaigns during Xmas Eve, Xmas, New Year's Eve, and New Years Day? Is PPC just as effective or more so on these holidays? Are you people still running your campaigns during these times?

Adwords Editor version 7,0

2008-12-26T12:00:00.000-08:00

New features:

First page bid estimates: AdWords Editor now uses first page bid estimates for your keywords. Minimum cost-per-click (CPC) bids are no longer used.

Keyword Quality Score: The Keywords tab now displays the Quality Score for your keywords.

Keyword Opportunities locale: Tailor your keyword suggestions to a particular language and location by changing your Keyword Opportunities locale.

Campaign targeting in the data view: You can view your targeting settings in the new 'Language' and 'Location' columns on the Campaigns tab. These columns are hidden by default, but you can select them with the column chooser.

Other updates:

The 'Volume' column on the Keyword expansion tab of the Keyword Opportunities tool now shows absolute numbers (traffic for the last month) instead of scaled values.
The Keyword Opportunities tool isn't available for draft accounts.

The details of all the new features may be found here: http://www.google.com/support/adwordseditor/bin/static.py?page=release_notes.html&hl=en

Carlsberg Web-TV channel

2008-11-17T10:19:00.000-08:00

Check out this cool site: partofthegame.tv. At this site you can play the video clips about football funnies and rituals from the Football Magic channel or the bizarre story about fans in the stand and how fan culture sometimes go beyond reason. You can also upload your own favourite football and fan moments at Carlsberg Web-TV channel. Theere are 5 channels showing all aspects about football from the classic football matches to life as a fanThis cool site was Carlsberg for football fans around the world. For more information please visit www.partofthegame.tv

Personal Cash Advance

2008-07-29T16:05:00.000-07:00

Do you need some amount of money now to pay your bill, or to fulfill your family necessities. Do you have called some of your best friend, but they can't borrow you some money. You also have try calling some bank to borrow money but you have to fill a lot of form, and you should still fill another requirement. Yach, getting a cash advance has never been easier.

Personal Cash Advance is the fastest way to obtain secure, cash advance loans and payday loans. Signing up and qualifying for a payday loan is quick and easy, and in many cases there are no documents to fax depending on the lender that accepts your loan data. Once a lender approves you for a cash advance, they'll electronically deposit the payday loan amount directly into your checking or savings account. Their service providers offer flexible payment options and a discreet service that gets you the cash you need right now. It's that easy, so why wait to get that cash advance?

Qualifying is easy. You just need to meet the following minimum requirements:

* Currently have a job (or receive regular income)
* Make at least $1000 per month
* Are 18 years of age or older and a U.S. citizen Have a checking account
* Other requirements may apply
* Even bankruptcy, bounced-checks, charge-offs and other credit problems don't prevent you from receiving the cash advance you need.
* Not active in the military.

When you need cash money within a day, remember Personal Cash Advance. This site will match you with lenders who can give you the funds you need as soon as possible. The paycheck advances are 100% safe and the form is handled completely online.

Pepperjam give you $10 as a signup bonus for becoming publisher

2008-07-16T11:22:00.001-07:00

One of the innovative new affiliate networks to hit the market in the last 6 months is Pepperjam Network - and today they are offering you $10 as a signup bonus for becoming one of their publishers.

If you want to earn money by recommending products from companies like eBay, Cartoon Network, StarTrek.com, Jelly Belly, Sesame Street, Net Shops, SEOMoz, igourmet and many more (they seem to add new ones every day or two) then PepperJam is a network that you’ll want to test run whether you get the signup bonus or not because they are one of the fastest growing online marketing networks going around (according to MarketingSherpa).

To get the $10 signup bonus you just need to

* sign up for the program
* be approved as a new publisher to their network.

The Future of Advertising

2008-07-14T14:22:00.000-07:00

A billboard located at the street corner is watching you. A camera is embedded in the billboard and a computer analyzes the people who pass by it. It tells the advertiser how many people walked in front of the screen, turned to face the ad and how long they looked at it. It reads your gender with an accuracy of 85%, so men and women will each see different ads.

Plans are already underway to detect different ages and even family groups. This intuitive digital advertisement exists, courtesy of Quividi, a French marketing technology firm.

In the future, ads themselves are engineered to obtain information on its audience, with the mined data immediately fueling message customization. Consumer data is a valuable commodity that will influence businesses and their initiatives even more than the present.

It’s already happening on the web. Internet services and media companies like Yahoo, AOL and Google are fast understanding that effective contextualization of ad messages requires the continous accumulation and usage of individual data. read more here

Cheap eye glasses at Zennioptical.com

2008-07-14T14:08:00.000-07:00

Eye glasses for 8 dollars? I do not guarantee you can find any glasses for $8. But at zennioptical dot com prescription glasses are offered for only 8 dollars. Check it out now Zenni Optical $ 8 Rx Eyeglasses.

It’s a great deal so if you are in need of any prescription glasses, be sure to head over to zenni optical. Let see this special offer Incredible Stylish New Frames From Zenni.

Don't worry about the quality. ZenniOptical.com sells quality stylish prescription glasses online. The Secret to Zenni’s Low Prices is that they sell only their own manufactured frames direct to the customer, with no middlemen and virtually no advertising budget. It's a good info for you that Zenni Optical was on FOX news!

Get paid to blog with Bloggerwave

2008-05-13T11:08:00.000-07:00

Do you have a blog and want to make some extra money? This is a good opportunity for blogger, you can make money from your blog. The rule is very simple. As a publisher, blogger post review as has been requested by advertiser and blogger will be paid from each review they posted on their blog.

To start making money from advertising with your blog, you can join Bloggerwave. Bloggerwave is aiming to be Europes biggest advertsing media on blogs and you can help us grow so more and more jobs will come.

Free $10,000 PPC Ads?

2008-05-12T14:22:00.000-07:00

I just came across a site that offers free $10,000 ppc ads. I just also signed up and it's very cool. I'm excited to share it to you since it's free.

Here's the site:

http://www.hophunt.com

Young model wanted

2008-05-09T16:16:00.000-07:00

Look Of The Year are looking for young people from all over the world to send in their best pictures so use this chance to be the next model working in Paris, New York or Milan.

This contest will compete for a fantastic price, the winner will get 10.000 USD and get spotted by an agency for model career. So, don't miss this great chance to be the next professional model.

Though if you don’t win, you still have opportunity to be discovered by model agencies. Are you what the model agencies are looking for? Send your beautiful photos and join this beauty contest and give millions of visitors the chance to rate your pictures. All winner will be announce at http://www.lookoftheyear.com on the 31st of December 2008.

PTC and PTR just waste of time?

2008-05-09T16:09:00.000-07:00

I do not agree with Hans that paid to click/read email will only waste of time. It's true that there are scams PTR/PTC. But, not all of them are scam. I do not agree with Hans since he assume that all ptc and ptr are scams. Read teh post "Paid to click/read email just wasting time"

"Big Bang" - Master List-1

2008-01-28T10:27:00.000-08:00

"Big Bang" -Master List is a group that intended to participate in another adventure in terms of Technorati authority. This will help you increase your authority link in technoraty, boost your traffic. For me, this is a kind of social blogging activities since one blogger help other to reach the same goal.

If you are interested in watching your authority grow, then just follow the simple rules below. Anyone can play so just have fun. Join "Big Bang" -Master List

You do not have to be tagged to play along. This game is simple and so are the rules.
1. Copy from *Start Copy Here* through *End Copy Here*
2. Add your site(s) to the list. Just be sure to post at each site you add.
3. Tag or don’t tag, your choice, however, the more tags you create the bigger the list will grow.
4. Let me know your blog’s name and url by leaving me a comment HERE. I will add you to the master list. (If you would like the scroll box code, leave me your email address and I will email it to you.)
5. Come back and copy the master list back to your site, often. This process will allow late-comers to get as much link benefit as the first ones in.

1-Attitude, the Ultimate Power 2-Juliana's Site 3-Rusin Roundup 4-Grow Rich Along With Me 5-Comedy Plus 6-lynda's loft 7-Amel's Realm 8-MAX 9-Speedcat Hollydale 10-Mariuca 11-Complain Complain Complain 12-Mariuca's Perfume Gallery 13-Life Is A Roller Coaster 14-Sugar Queen's Dream 15-First Time Dad 16-Life 17-My Life 18-The Painted Veil 19-My Thoughts 20-DatCurious.com 21-Little Aussie Cynic 22-A Nice Place in the Sun 23-DatMoney.com 24-The Down Side OF Up 25-Ladyjava's Lounge 26-Cat Tales 27-moms.....check nyo 28-Colorado Baby 29-It's a Woman's World 30-ENLIGHTENED BITS 31-My View of "It" 32-My Reviews and Finds Along the Way 33-Our Hep Chat 34-Rantings of a Woman 35-The Callalily Space 36-Mom Knows Everything 37-Hazel 38- Chronicles and Tales Unlimited (RED) 39-From the Mouth of Jabber Jaws 40-Sunny Side Up Foodie & Lifestyle 41-Carmel Corn 42-Daily Stock Picks 43-The Whole New World 44-Wifespeak 45-Slavery Bliss 46-Rooms of My Heart 47-Unpredictable Life 48-My Life, My World 49- At Your Service 50-All About Ebay 51-Everything Amazon 52-Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out 53-My So-Called Site 54-New Wife Blog 55-Tendre Poison 323 56-Nick's Bytes 57-My Scratch Pad 58-Choc Mint Girl 59-Life Is Just Around the Corner... 60-Amori, poseia, art... virtuali by Hanna 61-Maryannaville 62-monaco - monaco's 63-Nyumix's Blog 64-read my mind - my keyboard monologues 65-Shower You Children With Love - The Right Way 66-Secret Agent Mama 67-Pinaymama's Diary 68-Answers to the Questions 69-Work of the Poet 70-A Total Blog 71-My life, my hope, my future 72-NORTE 73-A Window to Our World 74-Life as a Mom 75-FIELD OF DREAMS 76-lisgold 77-See Me for What You 78-Caught in The Stream 79-Pinay Mommy Online - My Home 80-I'm Running To Win Two 81-CRUEL VIRGIN 82-Garden of Moments in Blog 83-So Cute 84-Love Everlasting 85-WeLcOmE To My CriB 86-WELCOM TO PINAYSMILE'S JOURNEY 87-Ice's Icelog 88-Jenny's Wandering Thoughts 89-Hobbies ans Such 90-Sweet Paradise 91-Mommy's Gibble Gabbles 92-Rusin Review's 93-My Small World 94-Little Peanut 95-Online Ramblings 96-My Mood My Feeling 97-BLOG it with ALLEN 98-Entertainment World 99-Let's Go Singapore 100-Firelynx 101-Catsy Carpe Diem 102-Every Beat Of My Heart 103-Always Da Fresh Princess 104-Listening.. Learning..Living 105-All About Mars 106-Syii From Afar 107-Some Thoughts I Have 108-From Here and Beyond 109-My Paid To Blog 110-Scholarship Corner 111-Cell Phone Review 112-"Apples of the Eyes" 113-It's All About Play 114-The Luttrull Journey 115-RennyBA's Terella 116-Unchained Melody 117-Out of the Blue 118-The Lure Of the Unknown 119-Maricel's 120-my blog 121-Spiff, the Spaceman 122-Living Well 123-The Dog Log 124-Catnip Corner 125-A Piece of Idea 126-Observations From the Back 40 127-Poetry by The Redneck Gypsy 128-Odd Facts 129-Juliana's Lair 130-My life is murphy's law 131-lisgoldsmemoirs 132-My memories, as time goes by 133-Somewhere over the rainbow 134-Blogging by Sandee 135-Our Journey to this so called life 136-Idaho Daily Photo 137-Memories that Never Fades.. 138-Anything goes 139-Your Caring Angels 140-Little Paces 141-Laketrees 142-PoeARTica 143-fracas 144-Just FraCas 145-Archies Archive 146-Growing Up Together 147-A Woman's Diary 148-Mother's Got A Dot Com 149-Close To You 150-Hot Shit Form Here 151-Astro Galaxy 152-Detector 153-

*End Copy Here

I tag for : Comedy Plus - Life - Movie Corner - Greatest Literary Works - Successful Dating Tips - Review Bisnis Internet - Paypal Indonesia - Rahasia Bisnis Internet - Scholarship Info - Funponsel - Free Ringtones - Get Paid to Blog - Bali Hotel - Singapore Tour - MLM - Forex Trading - Marketiva - Adsense Success Stories 2008 - Hanna - Colorado Baby - Lisa - Lolli - Norm - Paula- Angelbaby - Carol - Shoshana Rose -Chris - Francine - Joy - Mary Ann - Claudette - Jeremy - RennyBA

How to Make CPC Ads Convert

2008-01-26T10:22:00.000-08:00

These tips are coming from Darren Rowse, the owner of problogger.net.

1. Positioning - in general ads close to your content work best. Ads above the fold usually work best. Other key spots are anywhere that your reader naturally ’stops’ reading (ie at the end of an article).

2. Relevancy - you can have the prettiest and most well positioned ads in the world but if they are not relevant to your reader (and the content you’re writing about) then you’re unlikely to have them click it. This is why ‘contextual’ advertising works so well - it see’s you’ve just written about iPods and puts an ad up for iPods. If you’re using an ad network that isn’t contextual you’ll need to find ways to manually choose relevant ads.

3. Traffic - it’s obvious, but once your ads are well optimized you can have the most impact upon how much it earns by getting more traffic to it. However not all traffic is equal in terms of conversion. I’ve found that traffic from search engines can be quite good at getting clicks on ads like ‘AdSense’ ads while traffic from another blog with a good recommendation from the blogger can do better with affiliate programs. Traffic from regular readers is harder to convert with CPC ads so again affiliate programs can be better.

Get money easily from PTR, Join Smorty!

2008-01-25T04:01:00.000-08:00

After leaving Paid to Review (PTR) program for last few days, I finally decide to monetize this blog with PTR. This is my review for Smorty.com.

As a blogger, you have big opportunities to earn money from reviewing the advertiser site. It is very easy. After Smorty's admin approved my blog, I immedietly get four review campaigns. I got $6-$7 for each review. The most I admire from this PTR, as a publisher, my review compaign steadily increasing from day to day.

We do not need to wait our earning payment each month. Publisher can request payment each week!

For advertiser, this is your change to boost your search engine rankings with quality inbound links from thousands of blogs. Increase your websites traffic.

Both blogger and adveritser, visit this blog for money [source: My Paid to Blog]

CPC Ad Networks - Adbrite, Bidvertiser, Clicksor, Chitika, Adsense

2008-01-25T03:56:00.000-08:00

CPC Ad Networks - Adbrite, Bidvertiser, Clicksor, Chitika, Adsense

Adbrite is a well established Ad marketplace that offers publishers with a number of ways to monetize their websites. These include CPCs, CPMs, In-Line Ads, Video Ads, Full Page Ads and also an option for advertisers to buy a link on a website for a period of time.

Their CPC concept revolves around their Site Directory of Publisher Sites where advertisers can choose to place ads on websites of their choice. Advertisers also have the option to place network Ads which allows the ads to be shown on publisher websites of the selected demographics.

Type: Site Targeted
Good For: Sites with good traffic as it encourages advertisers to bid on your site raising your minimum CPC.
Views: For Adbrite you need to attract advertisers to place ads on your site as its not contextual, therefore its best if your ad zones are of a specific niche rather than general. This is especially true as attracting advertisers showing related ads will increase your CTR.

Network Ads can be shown if there are no advertisers which is around 0.05USD to 0.08USD a click so for some niches it offers reasonable return. Sites with big traffic like proxy sites, forums, entertainments sites will make good money from Adbrite, especially if they get a few Site Targeted Advertisers.

One thing to remember, as with most networks is that it takes Adbrite a few days to register and collect the stats of your site to sell to their advertiser network. With Adbrite especially as your site doesn’t even appear in their Site Directory until 5-6 days.

Payment: check - monthly - min USD5

More Info
Bidvertiser

Bidvertiser’s CPC model is based on advertisers bidding on your site and the ads with the highest bid is shown. There is also an option for based on demographics which is how most ads will be shown initally.

Type: Site Targeted
Good For: Sites with in a specific niche that fits into Bidvertiser’s Categories.
Views: Whilst we have found that the CPC is quite high at over 0.10USD, it seems that your site should be in one of the categories specified by Bidvertiser if you want more relevant ads to be shown. We tested Bidvertiser on a general topic site and therefore our ads were not very well targeted and hence a low CTR.

Overall, I think worth a try for the right kind of site due to its high CPC. We registered a couple of clicks at over USD1 which I expect to occur more often as advertisers bids for our site.

Payment: Paypal, check - monthly - min USD10

More Info
Chitika

Get Chitika eMiniMalls

Chitika offers a number of ways for publishers to implement their CPC ads onto their web sites. Chitika has labeled their eMiniMalls as a interactive product merchandising service and is basically a banner ad that promotes products from Chitikas merchant partners.

Chitika however offers publishers CPC rather than CPA and is one of the first to do this followed recently by WidgetBucks and ShoppingAds.

As with most shopping network referral CPC, reports are audited before payment so expect to see a change to the revenue shown on your report before auditing is complete. We are finding the Unaudited earnings to be quite high at over 0.15USD CPC and their range of ad types means that you can see which one fits your site best.

Type: Contextual / Keyword
Good For: Shopping Sites and sites with good traffic.
Views: We have only recently began testing Chitika but like what we see. Unaudited CPC seems quite high at over 0.1USD per click.

There seems alot of products in the Chitika database so targeting should not be a problem and we will report on the CTR soon.

Payment: Paypal, check - monthly - Min USD10 for paypal and USD50 for checks

More Info
Clicksor

Clicksor is a contextual CPC ad network with a popular following. Less strict on restrictions than Google allowing Mature content sites a contextual alternative, proxy sites are not allowed though.

Publishers meeting the requirement can apply to be a Premium Site partner and have access to more options and reporting.

Type: Contextual
Good For: Contextual alternative. Mature content sites.
Views: CPC seems a little on the low side averaging about a quarter of what we usually get from Adsense. Due to a smaller pool of advertisers, we found that the ads shown were not very relevant or in quite a lot of cases, no ads were found but that maybe due to geographical targeting.

Additionally, we noted that the ad banner seemed to load quite slowly. We know it works for some webmasters but didn’t work for our test site too well.

Payment: Paypal, check - bi-monthly - min USD50

More Info
Google Adsense

Adsense is still the big daddy of the CPC networks with their excellent contextual engine, lots of advertisers, higher than average CPCs and financial muscle to back it all up. Adsense is still the network to have unless you’ve been banned or in a niche that Google offers low CPCs for.

Type:Contextual
Good For: Adsense is great for all kinds of sites, especially content sites for high CPC niche such as Insurance, Legal, Loans, etc.
Views: Adsense still represents my main revenue source. Google has recently relaxed their guidelines and are allowing webmasters to use other Ad networks as long as they are made to appear different to ADsense ads. This has made Adsense a must in my view for webmasters wanting to sell advertisements on their websites.

Payment: check - monthly - min USD100

Sign up for AdSense.
Yahoo Publishers Network

YPN seems like they have been in beta for decades. For this reason they are still unavailable for International sites (Non US) and hence I am unable to test them.

Word is that they offer a good alternative (some say better) to Adsense from those who has been approved, the trick is to actually get approved into the network.

Type: Contextual
Good For: YPN works on a similar model to Adsense so would share similar characteristics.
Views: As I have mentioned not tested so maybe some visitors can inform us.

Payment: check - monthly

More Info
WidgetBucks

Earn $$ with WidgetBucks!

WidgetBucks is a new shopping network based CPC network that claims above USD2 CPM. We have did a in-depth look at it when it was released here.

Type: Category Targeted
Good For: Sites in niches that have low CPCs from major networks but good traffic.
Views: When launched WidgetBucks took the Internet Marketing World by storm with steady 0.5USD clicks and nice looking ads. Recently, the world has found that the high CPC was before auditing which made it come down to more realistic figures. It still offers very attractive CPCs at over 0.2USD and have gained quite a following.

A lot of webmasters are still withholding judgment for when WidgetBucks starts its first payday which should be sometime in December 07.

WidgetBucks are now offering USD25 to new publishers signing up.

Payment: Paypal, check - monthly at 45 days following the month your account balance reaches USD50.00 [source: www.xenyo.com]

Publishers Guide to Ad networks

2008-01-25T03:50:00.000-08:00

Do you want to make more money on your website or blog? Only have Adsense on your site?

Its time you start looking into ways to add to your Adsense income and in this article, I’ll list and review the Ad networks that can help publishers accomplish this goal.

The Basics

What is an Ad network?
Basically, Ad networks helps web publishers to sell advertisement on their websites. Their main role is to find and market your website to potential advertisers for you. There are more and more networks springing up each day so its about time Xenyo did an introduction and review of the more popular ones.

I have Adsense on my site already, why do I need to look at others?
Whilst Adsense is a great ad network, some sites earn more by using other networks or even running ads together with Adsense Ads. Google has relaxed their restrictions regarding using Adsense with other Ad networks and more info on this can be found on the Jensense blog.

So how do I put the ads up?
As not all of us are technically gifted, the kind folks at most ad networks have made it easy to put up and maintain your ads by providing you with a JavaScript code that you copy and past onto your website. Once its done, the code magically calls up the relevant ads to your web page from the networks pool of advertisers.

For Cost per Action (CPA) or affiliate marketing networks however, more effort is usually required to pre-sell your visitors for maximum effect and therefore most publishers choose to embed the affiliate coded links manually to each page.

Whats the difference between site-targeted and contextual ads?
These terms refers to how the network chooses which ad to display on your site. For contextual ads, the network scans your website or web page for keywords and displays ads that it regards as relevant to your visitors.

For site targeted ads, your web site or its industry is used to determine what ads are displayed. Generally speaking, contextual ads should return more relevant ads and therefore result in a higher Click Through Rate (CTR).

Get on with it!!??!!
Ok Ok,…. heres a list of the popular types of ads that is available for you to market on your website and the networks that provide them:

Types of Ads

Cost per Click (CPC)
CPC ads in this guide refers to networks that provides ad blocks that pays the publisher a certain amount for every click of an ad displayed on their site. The price of each click or Cost Per Click (CPC) differs between each network, website, industry and will be covered in more detail in our CPC Ad Networks Review.

Google Adsense
Yahoo Publishers Network
Adbrite
Bidvertiser
Chitika
Clicksor
WidgetBucks
ShoppingAds

Find out which network will work best for you in our CPC Ad networks review.

Cost per Impressions (CPM)
CPM ads are paid based on the number of times they are shown on the publishers’ website - impressions. The price of each impression (or more commonly termed Thousand impressions, CPM) differs between each network, website, industry and will be covered in more detail in our CPM Ad Networks Review.

Google Adsense
Adbrite
Casale Media

Find out which network will work best for you in our CPM Ad networks review.

Cost per Action (CPA)
In a CPA model, the publisher gets paid when a visitor they have referred to the advertiser completes an action such as signing up or buying a product. For this reason, the revenue the publisher earns is defendant on the advertiser and is commonly set as a percentage of the sale for products sold such as 10% or 15%.

The CPA model is often referred to as affiliate marketing where the publisher is the affiliate and the advertiser is the merchant.

Google Adsense
Clickbank
Commission Junction
Linkshare
Shareasale
AuctionAds

Find out which network will work best for you in our CPA Ad networks review.

In-line Text
Some Ad-networks offer their ads to be shown in the text content of the publisher’s website, highlighting keywords in the text which links out to the advertisers site. The effectiveness of this method is often dependent on how well the contextual engine works to show a relevant match of the keywords.

In-line text is mainly a CPC model where the publisher gets paid per click of the keyword link. The price of each click differs between each network, website, industry and will be covered in more detail in our In-Line Text Ad Networks Review.

Kontera
Adbrite
Clicksor

Find out which network will work best for you in our In-Line Text Ad networks review.

Other Ad Networks (CPC)
Many Ad networks have sprung up offering different models for publishers to monetize their web sites. The foundation remains the same… publishers have web sites, Advertisers have Ads - the networks acts as the middle man.

We take a close look at the more popular networks that offer alternative revenue making methods in our Other Ad Networks Review.

TextLinkAds
PayperPost

BidVertiser Ads for Feeds

2008-01-25T03:48:00.001-08:00

Since BidVertiser launched Ads for Feeds, they have been closely listening to our publishers' feedback and the most common request was to find a solution that will enable them to run the ads while keeping their current feed address (and FeedBurner Subscribers Count).

To address this, Bidvertiser have now launched 3 unique solutions:

1. WordPress Plugin to allow you to seamlessly embed the BidVertiser Ads in your feeds. You can download the plugin from your publisher account.

2. Solution for FeedBurner that allows you to embed the BidVertiser Ads in your current FeedBurner address. Click here to learn more about the FeedBurner solution.

3. Solution for Blogger/Blogspot that allows you to embed the BidVertiser Ads in the footer of each of your post feeds. Click here to learn more about the Blogger solution.

All of those great features are now available for you in your publisher control panel under the Get Feed Widget button (after registering a feed). If you are new to BidVertiser, click here to create a publisher account.

Earning more with CPC (Cost Per Click) programs

2008-01-25T03:48:00.000-08:00

You might think that your earnings depends only on visitors, right? It’s one of the factors, for sure, but if you would just place ads wherever you want you might earn less than other webmaster with even less visitors but some techniques. I’ll give you some tips for Google Adsense, but basically it will work with any CPC program.

I’ve seen so many webmasters who are trying to discern their ads from site, for example: If site got white background and dark grey font color, they are making something like: blue ad background with white font and light green borders or something like that. This is not good idea in the most cases. Of course, visitor will notice your ad, but are you sure that visitor will read/view it for more than a second? You can always disagree with me, that’s only mine opinion, but I suggest you to make your ad look the same as your site content, make borders and background color same as your site background color, make your ad url/title same color as all your site links. This will definitely attract more attention; most will think that it’s a part of site so they will read that ad. So if ad will be interesting there’s big chance that it will be clicked, more clicks – less views = higher CTR.

I can give you mine own example, I own a free forum skins site (www.GPF-Design.com), when I had an exclusive ad with different colors than mine whole site theme it had near 1% CTR so I was earning just a few cents, but once I made it look like my site theme, CTR increased five times next day. It’s just example how important text ad color is.
So where should you place your ads? Good question. Most would place it at the top of the site, 468*60 for example. This is not good idea if you are being paid for clicks, but not views, how many of you are looking there when you are surfing site? I suggest you to place ads in the corners or somewhere in the content. OK, I will give you one more example: let’s say that you want to buy laptop, you are looking for reviews first, right? You were searching via search engine for something like laptop reviews, found site. You didn’t place much attention to that site top, where most place ads, right? Good. So you are reading… Found that this one is the best in its class, so you think, ah, I will buy this one, and then you notice! Notice Google ad in the middle of the text where it says “Buy Cheap Laptops”, what a cool ad! You just wanted to buy this one, so what you do? You click ad and see what that e-shop/seller can offer, webmaster was smart and knew that it was good idea to place ad somewhere where it will be profitable. I suggest you to be smart too.

Of course, if you are getting paid for views or got some very exclusive ads which are being noticed you could get some clicks too, but most just will scroll site or surf around and won’t take many attention to the top again, but it’s your decision. It’s not always bad to place you ad there or make it look different than your site theme, just take a shot and try both.
Just don’t forget main rule: Ad shouldn’t make your site look ugly, it should decorate your site and make it look even better.

That’s it. Enjoy your growing earnings. [source: http://www.djixas.com/blog]

Adult Pay Per Click Ads

2008-01-25T03:36:00.000-08:00

Adult webmasters are constantly looking for new opportunities to monetize their traffic. 99,99% of adult publishers are using affiliation programs, using a revenue share model.

Competition among these programs is very tough and the adult industry is having some of the most advanced affiliation programs. When new technologies are emerging, the adult industry is very often well in advance compared to other markets. Video streaming, high load servers, innovative billing solutions... the adult business is always innovating.

PPC in the Adult Business

When it comes to PPC, the adult industry is kept behind. A few years ago, when PPC was getting more and more popular, these adult affiliation programs launched a PPC option to their revenue share model.

Today, almost all of them removed that PPC option. They were not able to control fraud and filter the traffic on the countries and niches really converting on their products. They gave up that model and stick with the revenue share system.

On the other side, with their corporate/mainstream image, the big PPC search engines of today do not accept adult ads nor adult publishers in their network.

ExoClick penetrated that market, and with its large experience on the adult traffic, provided lucrative programs for adult advertisers and publishers. ExoClick counts with a set of carefully selected publishers and a wide network of advertisers in the adult market.

What are the advantages of the PPC for adult webmasters?

There is a term well known in the adult industry: shaving! This word is used when affiliates see some sales "disappear" from their account. Or simply not granted in their statistics. Some affilation programs might be dishonest and remove sales to make some easy bucks or it can simply be a technical problem. With the pay per click model, no more shaving is possible. Each click is paid, no matter how many sales are done.
Because each click is stored and paid, results are immediate and conversions ratios can be calculated very fast. Using affiliate programs, the sales can sometime be very long to come and earnings projections are difficult to make in these conditions.
No more need to find alternative affiliate programs for certain countries or niches, the PPC engine is doing it by itself!
No more need to rotate promotional pages or change the marketing to try to make more sales. Using PPC, this is managed by the advertisers directly!

What are the advantages for the advertisers?
Or: What are the advantages for Affiliation programs owners?

Targeted traffic. Why get traffic that will not convert on their product? PPC allow to target by country, language, niche or keywords.
Full control over the incoming traffic and the costs. The advertiser decides of the traffic evolution and volume.
Affiliation programs could spare the efforts of managing affiliates and use those ressources to improve the products and conversions.

To learn more about ExoClick products and check adult pay per click, visit ExoClick web site.

Choosing a good Paid to Read (PTR) site

2008-01-25T03:34:00.000-08:00

How do you choose a good PTR site and avoid falling victim of a scam site? Before you join any PTR program always do the research.

1 Do not join many programs in a haste to make more money.

Many beginners think, if they join more programs they will make more. This is not necessary the case. Be aware that there are a lot of non paying scams on the internet.

2 Avoid sites promising a lot of money per email.

Do not be mislead by the sites offering tens and hundreds of dollars per each email. I don’t know any paid to read site to date that would promise unbelievably high values per each email and pay its members. I can confidently say all those are scams! I have looked at hundreds of PTR sites, and been a member of over one hundred programs. I can state with confidence, the most you will get paid is about 10 cents per e-mail. If you know of a program that in fact does pays more, please do let me know.

3 Analyze advertising prices on the site.

Most paid to read sites have advertising prices available on the separate page to view for everyone, but not all. Using simple math you can find out, if the ad prices are sustainable. For example, if it costs $1 to send 1 cent email to 1000 users (every user gets paid 1cent for reading it) the ad prices are not sustainable. It will cost $10 the owner to send 1000 emails with a loss of $9. The site wouldn’t make any money.

Ad prices will give you another important clue. Sometimes, sites don’t list on the home page the amount paid per each email read by members. You will know how much members get paid for reading certain types of email on advertising page. If you are seriously considering joining a site, and its pay per email is too low for you, then there is no need to waste time to join.

4 Do not be easily impressed by “just lunched” programs.

While it is not known if a program will turn out to be an honest one, it is very hard to predict its future. If you hear people praising new program as one of the best, be suspicious and ready to be disappointed.

5 Do take recommendations from others.

It never hurts to ask friends or members on GPForum or Advertise4less and other boards about a certain program. You may take a note of a person who told you about the program that turned out to be good.

But be warned here as well. You may join a program and find out it is not very good. Sometimes people market programs because they have friends who run them, it doesn’t mean programs you told about are good. What's more, often members try to get as many referrals as possible or win a referral contest for a prize at any costs. Overall, if a lot of different people praise the program the probability of it being good is very high. You will be on a right track to joining a good site.

6 Check who is the owner.

The business is only good as its owner(s). The owner(s) is/are the key to what kind of business conduct you can expect, and a sign of the program’s reliability. You can check on Whois to see who owns a particular site.

7 Consider joining paid to read programs from owners with proven paying record.

If you know a webmaster who owns a PTR site that pays, you can be sure that you will get paid, if you join a new program opened by this webmaster. Some program owners run several sites, and it is not rare to hear honest webmasters start new PTR sites.

8 Look in Black Lists

Sites such as "PTR Police" and "Been paid" have lists of programs with various problems: Those lists include approved and banned paid to read programs. They will give you an idea if a site you are looking to join was noticed in unethical business conduct, has poor communication with its members or other problems. You will be glad you checked these lists before you joined a program.

9 Always check Terms and Conditions

Read Terms and Conditions page and keep track of it, if you do decide to join. Sometimes change in payout or members responsibilities can indicate problems to come.

10 Check my list of established paying programs

To check out my list of TOP paying programs with the highest values per email go to Paid to Programs page.

Of course there is no way to ensure that even good, honest programs will stay clean and honest. Sometimes, ownership changes hands and things go downhill. Some program owners do not even let their members know when and if the site is being sold. For whatever reasons those program owners do not disclose this information, but the only ones who suffer in the end are the affiliates. I have been a member of some sites that have been sold to rookie owners and the sites that have been sold to even known dishonest owners. The end result has been the same – affiliates did not get paid. This is not always the case, and change of ownership doesn’t warrant problems will come, but it is a big enough change to take into consideration.

Pay attention to any updates from a paid to read website owner and read his/her emails to know what’s going on with the site. This may help you avoid staying in a program that may turn into a non payer.

Hopefully this guide will put you on the right track to join a good site. [source: www.createincome.info]

Turbocharge Your SEM/PPC Analysis

2008-01-25T03:31:00.000-08:00

Search Engine Marketing / Pay Per Click, is the hottest thing around. Everyone is doing it and if you are not doing it you dare not admit it for the fear of looking crazy. There are more agencies and consultants out there than you could care to count and all of us are trying to work with all of them trying to do our best.

My hypothesis is that while a few companies are laughing all the way to the bank as a result of their SEM/PPC campaigns the rest are probably not maximizing return on investment.

We in the Web Insights world can play a killer role in helping our companies truly measure effectiveness of our SEM/PPC campaigns. We are unique because we can cut through the crap because of our awesome analysis powers, our access to all the data and our ability to think beyond base metrics like CPC or CPM. Yes people are doing CPA now and we are even measuring Conversion Rate by Key Phrase. But there is more.

Here are my suggestions to us Web Insights Analysts for providing deep insights to our decision makers, and potentially a competitive advantage to your company:

# 5: Measure your Bounce Rate (aggregate and by top key phrases)

My definition of Bounce Rate is someone who stays on your website for less than five seconds. Some folks define this as visitors who stay on the site for one page or less, this is fine as well.

The conversion rate for most sites, per shop.org’s most recent study, is around 2.2%. When we do PPC/SEM campaigns we are thrilled to get 3% conversion rate and we ask for more money to spend. But since we are paying for this traffic we should expect much more than a bit better than normal conversion rate.

Measuring the Bounce Rate for SEM/SEM traffic in aggregate is an eye opener. It usually turns out that the Bounce Rate is really high (60%+, often even higher). Decision Makers are shocked that 60% or 80% of the traffic stays for such a small amount of time because we are paying for each click at the search engine.

It gets even more interesting if you measure Bounce Rate by Key Phrase. This will highlight stinkers very quickly, phrases that drive traffic that stays for five seconds or less (or only one page).

The point of the recommendation is to really dig into your traffic. It is possible that the key phrase is the right one but people are landing on the wrong page. It is possible that the phrase is ok but you are not repeating the value proposition on the landing page, or the offer is missing etc. Once you know you can fix, and oh do set the bar higher for PPC/SEM campaign conversion rates.

# 4: Audit you Vendors/Agencies

The de-facto standard is agencies are running campaigns using some very sophisticated analysis (bidding) and measure “success” using third party javascript tags on your website. This is good progress. But there is more.

There are often problems with third party cookies. Each agency seems to be using a different kind of data capture and data processing system. They also define the same metrics differently (even metrics say like repeat visitors or visits to purchase) and they don’t do any analysis on site effectiveness because they are, rightly, optimizing your bids.

My recommendation is to request (or force as the case may be) your agency to add an extra url parameter at the end of the URL string that goes to the search engine. This should be a parameter that your analytics tool will recognize (usually something simple like kaushik.net/avinash?source=google-avinash_is_nice will do). Now power up the segmentation in your tool and slice off the SEM/PPC traffic and match up key metrics like count of visitor, time on site, bounce rate, conversion rates using your own analytics tool.

The numbers will not tie, but if they fall within 10% you are fine. What you will usually find is they will be off by 20 or 30%, that would be a great time to compare notes with your agency because if they are measuring success 30% higher than you then it is likely your campaigns are not performing as well as you think.

Another benefit is that you can now truly, with inherent knowledge of your business that your agency does not have, analyze what this traffic is doing and understand their behavior and work on site optimization.

I have to stress that the Agencies are doing the best they can, they are not trying to mess with you. It is simply that there are limits to what they can do and you need to step up and take your responsibility.

# 3: Measure Cannibalization Rate (vs. Organic)

Another false measure of success, and very prevalent, is that we start buying our “branded key phrases”, traffic shows up, we pay google and overture, there are sales and success is declared. But if you have done decent SEO (search engine optimization) it is possible that you might still have gotten traffic from search engine (especially your well recognized branded key terms) from Organic results. Do you know how much you are cannibalizing your Organic (free) traffic by doing PPC (paying per click)?

This is a very powerful metric and something you should be watching all the time and based on the results of that analysis optimizing your SEM/PPC spend. Many good Agencies are doing this, demand it from yours.

I will share a very simple way of measuring cannibalization. Take some of your most popular branded key phrases, assuming you don’t have heavy weekly seasonality factors, and turn off your campaigns for those key phrases for a week. Measure number of visitors, bounce rates, engagement with site (if you have that metric) and conversion rates. Turn on the campaigns next week and measure the same metrics again, for the PPC/SEM slice. Compare the two sets of numbers and you have a nice idea of how much you are cannibalizing your Organic (free) traffic when you spend on PPC.

My recommendation above is not the most awesome, but it is a really simple way to measure cannibalization. I am sure you can think of ten better ways, what is important is that you measure cannibalization and then make informed choices. Why pay for traffic that you could get for free?

# 2: Aggressively push for Testing & Experimentation

Testing and experimentation is not normally considered the scope of web analytics, but it should be. One of the beautiful things about key phrases is that we can infer intent from them. It is likely that 60% of your site traffic is No Referrer and you don’t know squat about them and you can’t give them relevant content, but with your search traffic you know something of value.

Partner with key marketers in your company and implement a testing strategy (multi variate, AB, DQB, RRR does not matter) that will allow your to try different content, pages, structures, layout, navigation based on what you understand about the intent of those key phrases. The result will be optimal customer experiences for your PPC/SEM traffic and a huge spike in conversion rate, whatever you are selling.

(And if you set persistent first party cookies you can “remember” the SEM/PPC driven traffic and the next time they come you know who they are, which test experience worked for them, or did not, and now your site can start to have much richer interactions with them.)

# 1: Strive for “Multi Goal” Understanding of Visitors

No website exists for just one purpose, not even the simplest one. Yet almost all SEM/PPC campaigns are measured by one outcome goal (usually a conversion rate of some kind, purchase or a lead submission or visiting a page listing your core content). If the traffic comes for a few different purposes why measure them all by one goal? (To beat a dead horse, this is another reason to do testing.)

For your SEM/PPC traffic set multiple relevant goals. For example along with Conversion Rate you can also measure Customer Satisfaction and Task Completion Rates by surveying that traffic (if your web platform allows that). This will tell you oh 10% are converting but the others were looking to print pages or your tech support number or came to read reviews. You can then take relevant action to optimize your campaigns.

Or you have a frequent turnover site, set goals for Multiple Purchases in each Month, great complement to just conversion to first purchase. Or here is a nice one, if you follow the advice in #4 above, amass data for x period of time then compute “Live Time Value” for SEM/PPC campaigns and use that to optimizing your bidding as well as set a new bar for success. Bottom-line, if you are measuring “single goal” success for your campaigns, there is opportunity to get more sophisticated.

As usual ; ) I have one bonus recommendation for you…….

# 0: Help Measure the Value of the “Long Tail”

The concept of the long tail, as applied to Search Marketing, states that there are hundreds of key phrases that individually drive small amounts of traffic to your website, but if added together they can be a huge amount of, potentially profitable, traffic.

Thanks to our current analytics packages we are all used to only looking at Top 50 key phrases from each search engine. Maybe you look at the Top 150 because after that you have the “onesies” and “twosies” and we don’t care. But the delightful thing is that these key phrases are not a part of cut-throat bidding process in ad-words or overture or ad-center.

The implication is that if you can identify your “long tail” and make that a part of your SEM/PPC campaigns (assuming you are using some automated bidding system), you can capture a large share of this traffic and do so at very effective costs and turn great profits for your company.

There are limitations to identifying the long tail just using your clickstream package so use other tools that are on the web and/or ask your Agency. I also recommend HitWise as a great source. But help your company look beyond the obvious / “top” key phrases and go after the long tail and help them measure the value of the long tail. [source: www.kaushik.net]

PTR has been thriving, PPC market now is getting dropped?

2008-01-25T03:19:00.000-08:00

The ptr, paid to read industry is thriving. It's large, it's memberbases are in the thousands, and it's for the most part 100% relient upon 'paid to search' ads as it's only income stream.

Since bid values have dropped so drastically this past year and a half, many of the more popular ptr sites have now turned toward the 'forced-search' model, wherein their members doing the bogus searches on your ppc bids do not get paid if they don't do the searches. Yes, they can track them now, and it's common practice at all of the better earning ptr sites now.

I don't know of a ppc company that is not affected by ptr. The two 'big players', with their contextual products, are for the most part hit via 'hidden' means now, the domain parking ads attempt at the ptr sites having met with a dismal ends when reported to the better of the parking companies, who basically shut them down, resulting in closure of the two biggest and most popular ptr sites during that phase about 6 to 9 months ago.

Now, what remains of it, or direct to the big two cpc players, is mostly done with hidden auto-click-scripts in 0-iframes, which is still very prominent at many ptr sites.

The vast majority of the remaining ppc players continue to be targetted for their traditional ppc search results listings, and this continues to be the backbone income stream sustaining the paid to read industry.

On this front, many of the small ppc search engines used as the 'vehicle' to connect the ptr clicker to the ppc advertisers submission at the higher level 'feed' are also becoming more apt, and are now commonly using simple 'domain-hopping' to display search results, so the dozens of engines running as paid ads at the ptr sites cannot be traced as the origen of the click showing in the ppc advertisers click logs, as the results hop to another domain from where the search term itself was clicked, virtually hiding the traffic origen.

In this light, I'm wondering how effectively you all are making out at countering this? The problem seems daunting:

-There is NO known way to 'verify' that the search performed from acme#*$! search engine was in fact performed by a person being payed to click search results all day. You can Document that acme#*$! or any other ptr-search engine is in fact running the ptr circuit, and likely has no other traffic stream, but it's not 'proof' that the click was bogus.

-Then there is the now common problem of acme#*$! engine being sent to the ptr clickers, but when they click on one of the keywords provided, they are hopped to acmeyyy where the results, (your bids and texts) appear, so it is the Second Engine, not running at the ptr sites that shows up in your click logs.

I'm also wondering if there is any interest out there from ppc advertisers to shut the ptr search thing down entirely, and what you all feel might be an effective way to go about doing it? Do you feel that a forum created toward this end, where ppc advertisers and persons inside of the ptr industry willing to help, (there are plenty), could 'compare notes' would be of benefit?

I've toyed with this problem for several years now, and remained convinced that the crux of the issue lie in too few ppc advertisers being aware that a major portion of the poor traffic originates from what amounts to a 'paid to search' 'industry' that thrives out there.
I believe that to date, most efforts to counter this have been on an individual basis, and cannot help but think this may be a case where a 'collective' approach might well yield better results?

Here's hoping that's all acceptable to the moderation team of the forum, and that there is some interest in this material. [source: www.webmasterworld.com]

PPC or PTR, Which is more profitable?

2008-01-25T03:16:00.000-08:00

Nowadays, some bloggers are making money from Paid to Review (PTR) program. For me, PTR is the easiest way to earn intance money from blog with only make a post or give a positive review. But, I am now in dilemma to make money with PTR since google said that selling paid links can reduce the page rank?

I've just forward my old blog which had reached page rank 4 to this new domain, and now I have to manage this blog seriously in order to get back my page rank 4.

It’s a pity for me because I have to choose not to fullfil my review campaigns and lost some money....

Making money with PTR is actually easier than monetizing your blog with PPC (such adsense, bidvertiser, etc). In PPC, one day you will get lucky and another day you will be unlucky. Nevertheless, PPC (adsense) is still the best making money program for your long-term plan.

If you are interested to monetize your blog with PTR, this is some opportunities for you:

Blogvertise:
You can submit more than one blog, set your category, and your desired price per review. Write post at least 200 words. No minimum PR required. All language welcome. Recommend for beginners.

Reviewme: To get more review, you can update your blog category in your reviewme account (per week). Keep monitoring your review compaign, because you’ll lost your opportunities when your campaign expired.

Sponsored Review: Your price per review will be automatically generated by the sistem based on your blog page rank, link popularities and so on. My suggested price is $20-$200/per review. I take $75 per review and offer cheaper than my maximum review price. Publisher will get 65% net income from each review. So, if I take $75 per review, I will get $48.75. To increase your earning, you can find advertiser and set your bid. Please make a high quality review because advertiser will rate your reputation. When you’ve made a good reputation, you can get 200%-500% per review. Some advertise offer $500 per review!

Payperpost: This program strongly required blog with original post. No copy-paste blog join Payperpost. I think this the most selective PTR. Andy Beard prefer to choose this PTR than Reviewme and SponsoredReview. But, if you are a beginner, let’s find another PTR.

Smorty: This program will generate your price per review. Not much, but we can get more review campaign per day. [source:

Get Paid to website: Paid to Read (PTR), Paid to Click (PTC), Paid to Promoto (PTP), etc

2008-01-25T03:09:00.000-08:00

A Get Paid To Website, or simply GPT, is a website that pays its users to do certain tasks online. These websites are almost always completely ad supported, with the members generating the income for the administrator of the website. Users are required to sign up to these websites in order to participate.

Types of Get Paid To Websites

There are several different types of GPT websites.

Paid To Read

Paid to read (PTR) websites are probably the most common kind of GPT website. In a PTR website, users are paid a small amount of money (usually about 1 cent) for reading an advertiser's email. Since advertising is so cheap on these websites, there is seldom a shortage of emails for members. Paid emails are either timed or untimed. Timed paid emails require the user to view the advertisement for a certain amount of time (usually 20-30 seconds) whereas untimed paid emails just require the user to click into the advertisement page.

Paid To Click

Paid To Click (PTC) websites are similar to paid to read websites, the difference being that a PTC website displays its advertisements on the website, and so do not require the user to receive emails. Most paid to read websites are also paid to click websites, however there are some PTC-only websites. Advertisements on PTC websites, again, are either timed or untimed.

Paid To Signup

Also known as PTS or Paid offers, these websites pay members to sign up for sponsor offers. These offers usually cost money, and so these programs are not free. The problem with these websites is that there is often an overlap of offers between websites; for example several websites may have the same offer available.

Paid to Promote

These websites pay users to promote a link. They usually pay a small amount for every user who views the page.

Some websites fall in to more than one of these categories

Contextual Ads: IntelliTXT

2008-01-25T03:05:00.000-08:00

IntelliTXT is an advertisement platform developed by Vibrant Media, and is an example of keyword advertising. Website authors insert a script into their pages which calls the IntelliTXT platform when a viewer views the page; this script then finds keywords on the page and double underlines them. When holding the mouse over the double underlined link, an advertisement associated with that word will pop up. Advertisers pay to have their ads associated with particular words. "Context" is considered in an attempt to make the ads relevant to the web page hosting IntelliTXT.

The liability of this feature is that it makes pages more difficult to read; scrolling down the page may inadvertently cause delays while random ads flash on and pause before disappearing.

Publishers choose to run IntelliTXT advertising campaigns on their websites to generate advertising revenue. Some publishers choose to offer a help link inside the IntelliTXT ad box that leads to a page that offers to let you turn off IntelliTXT. Note that deactivation requires the use of HTTP cookie technology. If a user deletes or refreshes their cookies the service will be re-activated automatically and ads will continue to appear on the page. Also, many publishers have a short expiration date on the cookies, so they keep coming back after a couple of weeks or less.[citation needed] Also, since the cookie is stored by publisher, it also means that turning off the feature for one publisher has no effect on the other publishers that use these popups.

Recently, Ryan Block of Engadget posted a pledge to Engadget's readers that as long as he was in control of Engadget he would never use this form of advertising, mentioning IntelliTXT by name. Block abjured his fellow bloggers to shun these types of advertisements. His reasoning is that their potential to mar a user's experience is far greater than any benefit they might accrue.

Links:
The IntelliTXT Website

Contextual Ads: BidClix

2008-01-25T02:59:00.000-08:00

The BidClix Advertising Marketplace is an online advertising network with over 5,200 registered publishers and 10,400 registered advertisers. BidClix serves approximately 1.1 billion ads per month, reaching an estimated 25 million individual consumers in the US and international markets.

BidClix is a corporate partner of NetAid, a New York based anti-poverty organization. The company claims to provide free advertising to NetAid.

BidClix was the first[citation needed] online advertising network to create a "self serve" system that allowed advertisers to create and manage their advertising campaigns and allowed publishers to manage their online advertising inventory through a web-based interface. Prior to this model other advertising networks which required an employee to manually perform all tasks on behalf of the advertiser or publisher. The "self serve" system is widely copied today, and has become the standard in the online advertising industry.

In Dec 2004 BidClix licensed its ActiveMarket technology to Bell Canada, operator of Sympatico.MSN.ca, the largest web portal in the Canadian market.

The BidClix Advertising Marketplace has closed down as of July 31st.

Links:
BidClick Website

Contextual Ads: Yahoo Publisher Network

2008-01-25T02:55:00.000-08:00

The Yahoo Publisher Network (abbreviated YPN) is a beta network, launched on August 2, 2005 by Yahoo!. As the service is currently in Beta, it is currently only accepting US-Based publishers; it is believed that Yahoo! will expand this when the program comes out of Beta. YPN provides cost per click contextual advertising, similar to Google Adsense, as well as various tools and services to assist publishers in building and improving their websites.

In May 2006, YPN caused some controversy by shutting down accounts used for MySpace layout sites. The reason given was the quality of traffic was very poor.

Also in May 2006, the Yahoo Publisher Networks' blog posted an updated version of their requirements from publishers. YPN have now explicitly stated visitors must recognize advertisements as advertisements, and images/media may not be placed to induce accidental clicks.co

Links:

Contextual ads: Google Adsense

2008-01-25T02:49:00.000-08:00

Google AdSense, commonly just AdSense, is an ad serving program run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text, image and, more recently, video advertisements on their sites. These ads are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-thousand-impressions basis. Google is also currently beta-testing a cost-per-action based service.

Google uses its search technology to serve ads based on website content, the user's geographical location, and other factors. Those wanting to advertise with Google's targeted ad system may sign up through AdWords. AdSense has become a popular method of placing advertising on a website because the ads are less intrusive than most banners, and the content of the ads is often relevant to the website.

Currently, AdSense uses JavaScript code to incorporate the advertisements into a participating site. If it is included on a site which has not yet been crawled by the Mediabot, it will temporarily display advertisements for charitable causes known as public service announcements (PSAs). (The Mediabot is a separate crawler from the Googlebot that maintains Google's search index.)

Many sites use AdSense to monetize their content and some webmasters work hard to maximize their own AdSense income. They do this in three ways:

They use a wide range of traffic generating techniques including but not limited to online advertising.
They build valuable content on their sites which attracts AdSense ads which pay out the most when they get clicked.
They use copy on their websites that encourage clicks on ads. Note that Google prohibits people from using phrases like "Click on my AdSense ads" to increase click rates. Phrases accepted are "Sponsored Links" and "Advertisements".

The source of all AdSense income is the AdWords program which in turn has a complex pricing model based on a Vickrey second price auction, in that it commands an advertiser to submit a sealed bid (not observable by competitors). Additionally, for any given click received, advertisers only pay one bid increment above the second-highest bid.

AdSense for feeds
In May 2005, Google unveiled AdSense for feeds, a version of AdSense that runs on RSS and Atom feeds that have more than 100 active subscribers. According to the Official Google Blog, "advertisers have their ads placed in the most appropriate feed articles; publishers are paid for their original content; readers see relevant advertising — and in the long run, more quality feeds to choose from".

AdSense for feeds works by inserting images into a feed. When the image is displayed by the reader/browser, Google writes the ad content into the image that it returns. The ad content is chosen based on the content of the feed surrounding the image. When the user clicks the image, he or she is redirected to the advertiser's site in the same way as regular AdSense ads.

AdSense for search

A companion to the regular AdSense program, AdSense for search lets website owners place Google search boxes on their pages. When a user searches the web or the site with the search box, Google shares any ad revenue it makes from those searches with the site owner. However the publisher is paid only if the ads on the page are clicked: Adsense does not pay publishers for mere searches.

How AdSense works

In order to put ads on a web page, the webmaster inserts JavaScript code into the page.
Each time a page with an AdSense tag is visited, the JavaScript creates an iframe and sets its "src" attribute to the page's URL.
For contextual advertisements, Google's servers use a cache of the page to determine a set of high-value keywords. If keywords have been cached already, ads are served for those keywords based on the AdWords bidding system. More details are described in the AdSense patent.
For site-targeted ads, the advertiser chooses the page(s) to display ads on and pays based on CPM (cost-per-thousand-impressions, or the price advertisers choose to pay for every thousand ads displayed).
For referrals, Google adds money to the advertiser's account when visitors either download the referred software or subscribe to the referred service.
Search ads are added to the list of results after a user preforms a search.
Since the JavaScript is sent to the web browser when the page is requested, it is possible for other site owners to copy the JavaScript into their own web pages. To protect against this type of fraud, AdSense customers can specify the pages on which ads should be shown. AdSense then ignores clicks from pages other than those specified.

Links:

Contextual advertising

2008-01-25T02:47:00.000-08:00

Contextual advertising is the term applied to advertisements appearing on websites or other media, such as content displayed in mobile phones, where the advertisements are selected and served by automated systems based on the content displayed by the user.

Google AdSense was the first major contextual advertising program. It worked by providing webmasters with JavaScript code that, when inserted into web pages, called up relevant advertisements from the Google inventory of advertisers. The relevance was calculated by a separate Google bot that indexed the content of the page.

Since the advent of AdSense, the Yahoo! Publisher Network, Microsoft adCenter and others have been gearing up to make similar offerings.

Contextual advertising has made a major impact on earnings of many websites. As the ads are more targeted they are more likely to get clicked, thus generating revenue for the owner of the website (and the server of the advertisement). A large part of Google's earnings are from their share of the contextual ads served on the millions of webpages running the Adsense program.

Advertising on a Web site that is targeted to the specific individual who is visiting the Web site. A contextual ad system scans the text of a Web site for keywords and returns ads to the Web page based on what the user is viewing, either through ads placed on the page or pop-up ads. For example, if the user is viewing a site about sports, and the site uses contextual advertising, the user might see ads for sports-related companies, such as memorabilia dealers or ticket sellers. Contextual advertising also is used by search engines to display ads on their search results pages based on what word(s) the users has searched for.

Contextual advertising has attracted some controversy through the use of techniques such as third-party hyperlinking, where a third-party installs software onto a user’s computer that interacts with the browser by turning keywords on a Web page into links that lead to advertisers that are not paying the Web site to advertise on its pages. A contextual ad is the advertisement that dynamically appears on a Web site. [source: wikipedia.org]

Cost per action (CPA)

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Cost Per Action or CPA (sometimes known as Pay Per Action or PPA) is an online advertising pricing model, where the advertiser pays for each specified action (a purchase, a form submission, and so on) linked to the advertisement.

Direct response advertisers consider CPA the optimal way to buy online advertising, as an advertiser only pays for the ad when the desired action has occurred. An action can be a product being purchased, a form being filled, etc. (The desired action to be performed is determined by the advertiser.) Google has incorporated this model into their Google AdSense offering while eBay has recently announced a similar pricing called AdContext.

The CPA can be determined by different factors, depending where the online advertising inventory is being purchased.

CPA as "Cost Per Acquisition"

CPA is sometimes referred to as "Cost Per Acquisition", which has to do with the fact that most CPA offers by advertisers are about acquiring something (mostly new customers, prospects or leads). Using the term "Cost Per Acquisition" instead of "Cost Per Action" is not incorrect. It is actually more specific. "Cost Per Acquisition" is included in "Cost Per Action", but not all "Cost Per Action" offers can be referred to as "Cost Per Acquisition".

Effective cost per action
A related term, eCPA or effective Cost Per Action, is used to measure the effectiveness of advertising inventory purchased (by the advertiser) via a CPC, CPM, or CPT basis.

eCPA is used to measure the effectiveness of advertising inventory purchased (by the advertiser) via a CPC, CPM, or CPT basis. In other words, the eCPA tells the advertiser what they would have paid if they purchased the advertising inventory on a CPA basis (instead of a CPC, CPM, or CPT basis). [source: wikipedia.org]

Click-through rate (CTR)

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Click-through rate or CTR is a way of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign. A CTR is obtained by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad on a web page by the number of times the ad was delivered (impressions). For example, if your banner ad was delivered 100 times (impressions delivered) and one person clicked on it (clicks recorded), then the resulting CTR would be 1 percent.

Banner ad click-through rates have fallen over time, often measuring significantly less than 1 percent. By selecting an appropriate advertising site with high affinity (e.g. a movie magazine for a movie advertisement), the same banner can achieve a substantially higher click-through rate. Personalized ads, unusual formats, and more obtrusive ads typically have higher click-through rates than standard banner ads.

CTR is most commonly defined as number of clicks divided by number of impressions and generally not in terms of number of persons who clicked. This is an important difference because if one person clicks 10 times on the same advertisement instead of once then the CTR would increase in the earlier definition but would stay the same in term of later definition. [source: wikipedia.org]

Cost per mille (CPM)

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Cost per mille (CPM), also called cost ‰ and cost per thousand (CPT), is a commonly used measurement in advertising. In Latin mille means thousand, therefore, CPM means cost per thousand. Radio, television, newspaper, magazine and online advertising can be purchased on the basis of what it costs to show the ad to one thousand viewers (CPM). It is used in marketing as a benchmark to calculate the relative cost of an advertising campaign or an ad message in a given medium. Rather than an absolute cost, CPM estimates the cost per 1000 views of the ad.

An example of computing the CPM:

Total cost for running the ad is $15,000.
The total audience is 2,400,000 people.
CPM is calculated as CPM = $15,000/(2,400,000/1000) = $6.25

Examples:

In online advertising, if a website sells banner ads for a $20 CPM, that means it costs $20 to show the banner on 1000 page views.
While the Super Bowl has the highest per-spot ad cost in the United States, it also has the most television viewers annually. Consequently, its CPM may be comparable to a less expensive spot aired during standard programming. (But the truth is that Super Bowl prices have been as much as double a regular prime-time ad, because advertisers are willing to pay to be part of 'the event' that is the Super Bowl broadcast.)

Effective cost per mille
Effective cost per mille (eCPM) is used to measure the effectiveness of a publisher's inventory being sold (by the publisher) via a CPA, CPC, or CPT basis. In other words, the eCPM tells the publisher what they would have received if they sold the advertising inventory on a CPM basis (instead of a CPA, CPC, or CPT basis).

What is Pay per click (PPC)?

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Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising model used on search engines, advertising networks, and content websites/blogs, where advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser's website. Advertisers bid on keywords they predict their target market will use as search terms when they are looking for a product or service. When a user types a keyword query matching the advertiser's keyword list, or views a page with relevant content, the advertiser's ad may be shown. These ads are called a "Sponsored link" or "sponsored ads" and appear next to or above the "unnatural or nonorganic results on search engine results pages, or anywhere a webmaster/blogger chooses on a content page.

Pay per click ads never appear on content network websites. In this case, ad networks such as Google AdSense and Yahoo! Publisher Network attempt to provide ads that are relevant to the content of the page where they appear, and no search function is involved.

While many companies exist in this space, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter are definately not the largest network operators as of 2007. Depending on the search engine, minimum prices per click start at US$0.01 (up to US$0.50), these prices are often referred to as Costs Per Click (CPC). Very popular search terms can cost much more on popular engines. Arguably this advertising model may be open to abuse through click fraud, although Google and other search engines have implemented automated systems to guard against this.

Categories

PPC engines can be categorized into two major categories "Keyword" or sponsored match and "Content Match". Sponsored match displays your listing on the search engine itself whereas content match features ads on publisher sites and in newsletters and emails.

There are other types of PPC engines that deal with Products and/or services. Search engine companies may fall into more than one category. More models are continually evolving. Pay per click programs do not generate any revenue solely from traffic for sites that display the ads. Revenue is generated only when a user clicks on the ad itself.

Keyword PPCs

Advertisers using these bid on "keywords", which can be words or phrases, and can include product model numbers. When a user searches for a particular word or phrase, the list of advertiser links appears in order of the amount bid. Keywords, also referred to as search terms, are the very heart of pay per click advertising. The terms are guarded as highly valued trade secrets by the advertisers, and many firms offer software or services to help advertisers develop keyword strategies. Content Match, will distribute the keyword ad to the search engine's partner sites and/or publishers that have distribution agreements with the search engine company.

As of 2007, notable PPC Keyword search engines include: Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter, Ask, LookSmart, Miva, Yandex and Baidu.

Historical Background

In February 1998, Jeffrey Brewer of Goto.com, a 25 employee startup company (later Overture, now part of Yahoo!), presented a PPC search engine proof-of-concept to the TED8 conference in California. This and the events that followed created the PPC advertising system. Credit for the concept of the PPC model is generally given to the Idealab and Goto.com founder, Bill Gross.

Google started search engine advertising in December 1999. It was not until October 2000 before the adwords system was introduced. Allowing advertisers to create text ads for placement on the search engine. However PPC was only introduced in 2002, until then, advertisements were charged at CPM. Yahoo Advertisements have always been PPC, since its introduction in 1998. [source: wikipedia.org]