AdMoolah News and Views

There have been a lot of new advertising networks popping up in the last month or so. With many people complaining that AdSense isn’t doing as well for them as it used to, I think many publishers are ready to look for alternatives. Here is a quick overview of five networks that have been announced recently.

Performancing Partners Ad Network
This is a advertising network for blogs. Advertisers can buy ad spots on you blog on a monthly basis. Performancing has an “Auto Pricing” feature which determines the price of an ad based on your blogs statistics. These prices can be overridden by the blog owner. You can choose to place anywhere from 1 to 6 ads on your blog. When there are no ads to display, an ad for Performancing is shown. The good thing about about these Performancing ads is you get a 5% referral program for anyone who signs up through them. I have signed up for this program and am testing it on my blog right now (you can see ad on the the right sidebar). It takes 48 hours for the auto pricing to kick in, so I’m not sure what to expect yet.

Performancing pays 70% of the revenue to the blog owner. They also have a 5% lifetime referral bonus for any publishers or advertisers who sign up through your ad.

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Text Link Ads’ Feedvertising
Feedvertising allows you to insert text ads into your blog entries. The interesting thing about this is that it allows you to insert your own ads for free, or if you like to sign up for their advertising marketplace so advertisers can pay for ads. I have not yet used the Feedvertsing program, but I am considering trying it out. I like the fact the ads are unobtrusive and are clearly labeled as ads.

Feedvertising is free to use for your own ads. Publishers get 50% of revenue generated from the sales in the advertising marketplace. They also have a referral program which pays $25.00 for any referred visitor that results in a sale or gets accepted into the publisher program.

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Texsy
Texsy is an ad program that inserts ads into the text of web pages. Texsy underlines product names on your web sites and underlines them. When users hover over the underlined words, an ad pop up. The ads that are shown are from Amazon, Ebay and Shopping.com. Publishers must sign up for these affiliate programs for them to show up on web pages.

Texsy inserts its own ads into the publisher sites 20% of the time.

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AdQuick
This is a new advertising program that I don’t know much about. The web site does not provide much information, there is no Terms and Conditions page yet, the FAQ page is empty and they provide little information about how the program works. I’ve sent a message to them asking for more information. I’ll make a new post if I find anything significant.
Update: They now have a FAQ posted on the site, see: http://www.adquick.co.uk/faq.php. Still no T&C though, so I’m not signing up for now.

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ReviewMe
Review me is a new advertising program from Andy Hagans. Bloggers are paid to write reviews about an advertisers program. The review will have full disclosure that reviewer has been paid, and the review do not need to be positive. ReviewMe is not yet open to the public, but should be shortly.

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I’d love to hear comments from anyone who has experience with these networks.

I originally posted my AdSense Revenue Sharing List back in February. Since then I have added at least a few more sites to the list every month. It has now grown to 50 sites. As usual, if you know of other, feel free to email me at tlainevool [at] admoolah.com

Here is a list of the blogs that I consider essential reading for any web publisher. I tried to be selective and keep it to a reasonable size.

AdSense/PPC

JenSense – Making Sense of Contextual Advertising – Jennifer always has the latest scoop on AdSense and other ad programs.
Inside AdSense – Google official AdSense blog.
inside AdWords – Google official AdWords blog.
Yahoo! Publisher Network – Yahoo’s official YPN blog.
Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense – Eric Giguere always offers good advice on AdSense and other publisher related issues.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO Book.com – Aaron Wall, author of SEOBook (aff. link) offers great SEO tidbits.
Graywolf’s SEO Blog – Graywolf always has an interesting tae on the SEO world.
SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog – Solid SEO advice.
SEO BlackHat: Black Hat SEO BlogShedding light on the darker side of SEO.

Search

John Battelle’s Searchblog – Author of “The Search” has excellent insights into the world of search.
Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO – This Google employee always has good advice for publishers who are looking to keep clear of being labeled a spammer by Google.
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/ – Danny Sullivan’s SEW is an authoritative site,
Search Engines News – Great source for search engine marketing news

General Publishing

Shoemoney – Skills to pay the bills – Jeremy is a very successful publisher and has some great insights and speaks his mind.
Copyblogger – Great tips on who to write to attract traffic and sell.
AdMoolah News and Views – Of course I have to add my own blog!

Blogging

ProBlogger Blog Tips – The resource for anyone who has a blog.
Sifry’s Alerts – David Sifry runs Technorati and has a good grasp one what’s going on in the blogging world.

JenSense has the scoop on a new feature on AdSense for Search that allows you to open the search results on your own page instead of a page at Google.

This will be great for publishers who weren’t using AdSense for search because they didn’t want to send traffic off their own sites.

Google has a help page with the implementation details.

The ProductWiki Blog has an interesting post on comparing their revenue from AdSense versus their revenue from shopping.com affiliate ads. They found that the shopping.com affiliate program was 4.6 times more effective than AdSense was.

The lesson I take from this is that you should never settle for just on advertising source. See what else is out there and try it out. There are many different ad and affiliate programs, one of them could be making you a lot more money!

Found via Seth Godin’s Blog

One things that has bothered me about YPN is that they are very slow to report the previous day’s earnings in performance reports. I often want to check my balance for the day before I turn in, which is often just after midnight Pacific Time, and it never has the figures for yesterday’s revenue at that point. Today I realized that there is an easy way to calculate the previous day’s earnings.

First, note the “pending balance”, which is equal to the previous month’s earnings plus the earnings accumulated so far this month. Then run a performance report with a date range that include the previous month up to the current day. Subtract the “Report Totals” figure from the “pending balance” and you end up with yesterday’s revenue.

For example, today is August 3rd just after midnight Pacific Time. Let’s say my pending balance shows $500.00 (not the real figure). I run a report with a date range of July 1st to August 2nd. The report does not show August 2nd’s revenue and the total shows $450.00. I now subtract $450.00 from $500.00 and I know that I have earned $50.00 for August 2nd.

Now I can go to bed satisfied that I know how much I earned from YPN the day before.

As reported by ZDNet, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt had this to day about the click fraud problem:

According to Schmidt, Google’s auction-based pay-per-click advertising model is inherently self-correcting. Schmidt’s scenario for what would happen if Google did not police click fraud and it was “rampant”:

Eventually, the price that the advertiser is willing to pay for the conversion will decline, because the advertiser will realize that these are bad clicks, in other words, the value of the ad declines, so over some amount of time, the system is in-fact, self-correcting. In fact, there is a perfect economic solution which is to let it happen.

This type of attitude is bad news for publishers. If this were too happen the advertisers wouldn’t mind because they are paying less per click for fewer real clicks, so their ROI stays the same. Google wouldn’t mind because they are still getting paid for every click whether fraudulent or not. The click fraudsters would love it because they would be making lots of easy money. The only losers ion the equation would be the legitimate publishers. They would be earning less per click.

Note that this was a “what if” scenario, not something that Schmidt acknowledged was going to actually happen. It’s still scary that he thinks this is a “perfect economic solution” when the fraudsters are getting rich and the real publishers are losing out. Doesn’t sound perfect to me!

There has been a lot of talk recently about how click fraud is killing Cost-Per-Click (CPC) . Reports of bot nets generating fraudulent clicks have been appearing for a few months in places like ClickZ and JenSense . In early June, Mark Cuban expressed his opinion in a piece called Why I think ClickFraud is far greater than imagined.

More recently Outsell, Inc. published a report that click fraud is costing advertisers $1.3 Billion and that fraudulent click account for 14.6% of all clicks. This led to many mainstream news source such as The Financial Times and BusinessWeek to report these problems with click fraud and question the long term health of the CPC market.

Something else that has been seen as a sign that CPC is in trouble is that Google has recently started to experiment with CPA ads. Because of this some people concluded that Google itself worried about CPC in the future.

Are CPC programs such as AdSense and YPN really dying? Is click fraud going to kill them? Many people are predicting that CPC market will collapse the way the CPM market did several years ago. But, I think there are some important difference between the collapse of the CPM market and the current CPC market.

1. The CPM market reached its heights along with the Internet bubble. Web sites were willing to pay extraordinary amount just to get “eyeballs”. The more eyeballs they had the bigger there IPO would be. The CPC market is not in such a bubble.
2. One of the major problems with CPM advertising was that it was difficult to measure the effectiveness of it. With CPC advertising and good analytics, it is much easier to measure the exact ROI (Return on Investment) advertisers are getting for their money. If CPC ads were not working for the advertisers they would stop using them. Click fraud does happen and will continue to, but as long as the overall ROI of a CPC advertising campaign is positive, advertisers will continue to use them.
3. Google’s experiments with CPA does not automatically mean they are giving up on CPC. Google is constantly experimenting with new product and new ways of doing things. They are willing to try anything, see if it works, and when it does, they will introduce it as a full fledged product. Google generally does not introduce new products in a reaction to something, they are continually trying out new ideas.
4. There will always be advertisers that will want to use CPC instead of CPA. For example, car manufactures want people to visit their web sites and learn about their cars. They are not expecting to actually sell a car when someone clicks through to their web site. It is difficult to tie a visitor to a major car manufacturer’s web site to a specific action to charge via a CPA program.

All that being said, I do thing CPC is coming under some pressure. For certain industries, CPA ads can provide a better model for advertisers. Smart advertisers will try CPM, CPC and CPA campaigns and see which has the best ROI. Sometimes CPA will beat out CPC programs. Click fraud is another danger. If Google and Yahoo cannot keep the click fraud under control advertisers will need to drop their bid per click to maintain the same ROI. CPA ads can be harder to game than CPC ads, so they may have an advantage in this area.

I do believe that CPC ads are in there heyday right now, and prices may fall. Smart publishers will experiment with all type of advertising, CPM, CPC, CPA, Fixed price, or any other arrangement they can think of. Each niche and each website will benefit from different combinations of these types of programs, the publishers who make the most money will be the ones who maximize their revenue, regardless of the type of program used.

Google announced today that they are making things tougher for Made-For-AdSense (MFA) sites who use AdWords for advertising.

Google had this to day:

As you may recall, we began incorporating advertiser landing page quality into the Quality Score back in December 2005. Following that change, advertisers who are not providing useful landing pages to our users will have lower Quality Scores that in turn result in higher minimum bid requirements for their keywords. We realize that some minimum bids may be too high to be cost-effective — indeed, these high minimum bids are our way of motivating advertisers to either improve their landing pages or to simply stop using AdWords for those pages, while still giving some control over which keywords to advertise on. Although it is counter-intuitive to some who hear it, we’d rather show one less ad than to show an ad which leads to a poor user experience — since long-term user trust in AdWords is of overarching importance.

From time-to-time, we improve our algorithms for evaluating landing page quality (often based on feedback from our end-users), and next week we’re launching another such improvement. Thus, over the coming days a small number of advertisers who are providing a low quality user experience on their landing pages will see increases in their minimum bids.

I see this as a direct attack against MFA sites. MFA sites are sites which display AdSense ads and provide no useful content. Usually the content is simply copied from search results. These MFA sites target high paying keywords while using very low bids on the AdWords system to get traffic. Since there is little useful content on the pages, users end up often clicking on the ads. Many AdSense publisher despise these sites because they drive down the cost of an average click and do not provide users with any useful information.

The Google AdWords Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines clearly state that MFA type sites are not considered quality sites:

• In general, build pages that provide substantial and useful information to the end-user. If your ad does link to a page consisting of mostly ads or general search results (such as a directory or catalog page), provide additional information beyond what the user may have seen in your ad or on the page prior to clicking on your ad.
• You should have unique content (should not be similar or nearly identical in appearance to another site).

If this works out the way Google intends, it will be good for everyone in the AdSense ecosystem: publishers, advertisers and users. The only ones who will be hurt will be the MFA producers.

According to Seeking Alpha, Google’s AdSense has started to test CPA (Cost-Per-Action) ads, in addition to the CPC (Cost-Per-Click) and CPM (Cost-Per-Thousand-Impressions) they already offer.

Publishers are able to choose which ads they want to show on their site, and the ads will not compete with regular AdSense for Content ads.

Some interesting quote from the letter Google sent to select publishers:

How can I promote the CPA ad unit?

Since this is a test and these CPA ads are not regular ad units, we are giving you more flexibility in saying things like “I recommend this product” or “Try JetBlue today” next to the CPA ad unit. However, you should still not incite someone to click on the ad, so saying “Click Here” is not ok.

Google has never allowed this type of promotion with referral ads, so it will be interesting to see if this is allowed when the CPA ads come out of beta.

Will I be able to see reports within my account?

When the test begins, you will receive weekly email reports of conversions you have accrued and your total revenue within the CPA test.

Google already has reporting features for their own referral products, so I’m surprised that they won’t have online reporting. This means people testing the ads will have to wait at least a full week between changes to see what works.

This is a major addition to the AdSense offering and puts them in direct competition with networks such as Commission Junction. This could be a huge new revenue stream for Google and its publishers.

Found via John Battelle’s Searchblog