I had a call with a representative this week who is working to recruit sites Fox Interactive Media’s new ad network – Fox Audience Network. The unique aspect of the ad network is that they are using the demographic and profile information that they collect via Myspace (a Fox Interactive Media Property) and using their hyper-targeting algorithm to target ads on other websites. Therefore, if I my profile information on Myspace allows them to segment into one of the 500+ hyper targeting segments, they can target ads to my interest across any site in the Fox Audience Network.

Overall, I like the targeting concept, and I was very impressed with the system by the end of the call. The only thing that I did not like about the system was that the rep said we could not use it to only show ads if the user hit one of the hyper targeted (higher CPM) ads. The rep said that if we showed the networks ad code to a user that did not match any hyper targeted segments, the user would be shown “brand” ads. I really would like to be able to leverage the system to show premium priced hyper targeted ads when possible, and then use my other ad partners to fill my remaining inventory. Hopefully, the system will grow to include this feature. It will be interesting to see if Facebook launches a similar ad network product. I have a feeling that Facebook has even more meaningful and accurate data on their userbase than Myspace. The network is up and running now, and I would be very interested to hear about any initial success stories.

As part of my new job, I spent Monday and Tuesday as at Ad-Tech New York meeting with people from all over the online advertising industry. I went through all three floors, and spoke with many of the exhibitors. Some of the exhibitors that I was most interested in were:

SponsorSelect -They allow site visitors to choose a sponsor for their session. Once a sponsor has been chosen, the sponsor’s ads can be shown throughout the rest of the user’s session (or for the first X impressions) and the sponsor’s ad is launched in a pop-under. The net payment to the publisher is somewhere from $.18-.25 per user selection. This is a very interesting way to monetize a site. I could see it performing very well in the gaming vertical.

CX Digital Media (formerly Incentaclick) – Both their head of ad sales and the affiliate manager that I spoke to seemed to be very publisher focused. They had some good ideas and seemed a bit more engaged than some of the other CPA companies that I met at the conference.

NeverBlueAds – They also were very publisher focused and seemed committed to matching publishers with quality offers.

AffinityDirect – They generate leads for educational offers. I was very impressed with how they were willing to work with us to test new promotion methods and be a flexible partner.

On the banner side, I was intriguied by both Adsdaq and CPXInteractive. Both companies were hungry for our inventory, and were willing to offer some relativley good prices on the spot. Hopefully, our tests will live up to what they were offering at the conference.

Overall. it was a great conference. There was an incredible amount of interesting exhibitors and attendees. If you are interested in hearing more about my experiences working with the companies above and other companies in the space, subscribe to my RSS feed.

Although I am relatively new to promoting affiliate offers via PPC, I thought that might be worthwhile to share my Lazy Man’s systems for tracking my PPC traffic.

While the pros use nice custom developed software to track their traffic, I use a relatively simple spreadsheet. One worksheet contains the all of the offers that I am running and assigns a unique offer ID to each offer. The set of worksheets contains a tab with all of the keywords that I am running. Each record of keyword data contains an offer id for the offer that it is associated with and a unique keyword ID.

When I send traffic to the affiliate programs, I pass the affiliate a subid variable which is usually in the format of:

traffic source|offer_id|keyword_id

The traffic source represents where the traffic came from. For example, I use “g” for Google and “y” for Yahoo. If I have lots of closely related keywords with very low levels of traffic each (ex: typos), I will assign them to a keyword group and then substitute the keyword group for the keyword_id.
Most of the programs that I work with allow me to quickly pull a report that shows that the performance of each subid. This helps me to quickly assess how each keyword is performing for each offer without having to download additional reports or transform the data.

If I need to do further analysis, I download the reports to spreadsheets and use pivot tables to look at things like the keyword performance across all of the search engines where I use the keyword.

Future Improvements

The system performs well for me today, but in the future I would like to load my spreadsheets to mysql and create a web based system to manage the keywords. The new system would address some of the shortcomings in my system today such as tracking all of the information that Google can append via the AdWords auto-tagging feature (keyword phrase, ad variation, etc.).

I also have just started looking at the RevTrends affiliate aggregation services. I run offers from a number of affiliate programs today, and their service attempts to provide an aggregate view of your performance. They do not support all of the companies that I work with, and I am not sure of the level of granularity in their data, but it seems worthwhile to explore.

I will keep you updated as I make progress building out a system to effectively track my PPC traffic.

In the forums, I came across a leaked link to the new Adbrite Video Beta page. The system looks very impressive.

Key Features:

• An embedded player where Ads are shown in a text bar on the top, and float down in a pop up bubble that is 60 pixels high.
• The player has built in sharing capabilities similar to youtube, except when a video is shared the visitor is referred back to your site.
• Others can embed your video in their site, and the player will show your ads.
• You can provide a logo to be placed in the lower right corner of the video.

Depending upon the payout rate, this could be a great way to monetize a video site. I could see sites like break.com being all over this. It will be interesting to see if people rip videos down from youtube using a tool like keepvid and start niche video sites with Adbrite video ads.

This is a step in the right direction to monetizing video content, and I will be very interested to see how the service develops.

Hat tip to Jon from WickedFire for posting the link in the forum.

In Part of Getting Started in PPC Advertising, I mentioned that it is always a good idea to sign up with promo codes so that you can test out a system without losing any money. Paul Allen (not the famous microsoft guy), has a good post up where he lists a new discount codes from Ask and looksmart.

I had not heard much about a looksmart PPC program, and I was excited about the $300 in free credits until I read a review of the program over at AU Interactive’s blog. I would proceed with caution on looksmart. The Ask program looks interesting. I have read some posts on digitalpoint questioning the quality of their traffic, but with a .05 minimum bid, I am willing to give it a try.

This week I began my first venture into purchasing pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on search engines. I am monetizing the traffic via a variety of affiliate networks. This traffic has been the first large chunk of traffic that I have sent to Hydra Media, and I have to say that I have been quite impressed with the performance of their offers.
My first few learnings from my first week of PPC advertising are:

• Make sure you sign up for PPC advertising with special offers. Using coupons from the digitalpoint forums, I was able to get $50 free advertising on MSN and $75 free advertising on Yahoo. The free advertising has allowed me to bet with the house’s money while I am optimizing my campaigns and getting the hang of the systems.
• Typos are your friends. When I created my initial keyword lists, I entered a few typos keywords by hand. Then I started using typo generators to come up with all sorts of permutations for my keywords. In aggregate, typos can bring a good volume of traffic and very low keyword prices.
• Read, Read, Read. The wickedfire and digitalpoint forums provided some great background. I also found some interesting posts on the MindValley Labs blog related to techniques and statistics related to optimizing PPC ads.

From what I have been reading, it appears that many of the big search engines have or are starting to crack down on affiliate marketing via PPC. I will continue my experimenting in the area because it is an interesting space, and it is something that I do not know much about yet. As always, I will continue to post more of my learnings.

In addition to my experiments with AdBrite and YPN, I have been running a trial of Text Link Ads. Text Link Ads is different than Adsense. Instead of showing ads based on the content of your site, Text Link Ads brokers text ads on your site for a flat monthly rate. They serve the ads on your site without redirects, so the advertiers can receive some search engine optimization (SEO) benefit from the pagerank of the your site.
After completing a brief application, my site was auto-approved by Text Link Ads. There are a few different ways to integrate the ad code onto your site. I chose to use the PHP method which required me to install an xml file on my server and include an xml parsing function in my code. Although posting the ads in more complicated than putting up Adsense, it only took me a few minutes to get everything up and running. The extra complexity is so that the ads can be shown without using redirects.

Once I had the ad code integrated into my site, I had to wait for an advertiser to purchase one of the four text link ads that I put up for sale. While waiting for an advertiser to show up, Text Link Ads shows a blank ad. It would have been nice for them to at least offer to place run of network CPC or CPA ads to help me monetize the traffic in the short term. Adbrite offers CPC run of network ads while you are waiting for an advertiser to pick up your inventory.

Three days later, I received an email from Text Link Ads letting me know that someone bought an ad on my site. After approving the ad, it started showing up on my site and I was making some money. Overall, I have been very happy with the Text Link Ads and it has been very easy to use. I have read many positive reviews of the service around the web, and it could be well worth trying out on your site.
I recently purchased some ads from Text Link Ads as an advertiers, and I will be posting the results in the future. I also think it is important to mention that they have a solid affiliate program. The program pays $25 for every publisher or advertiser that you refer. I will be doing some testing of the affiiliate program as well and posting my results here.

In my efforts to test a wide variety of advertising programs, I gave Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) a try. YPN is Yahoo’s answer to Google Adsense. YPN provides contextual ads based on the content of your website.

A few days after applying on the site, I was accepted to the program. Getting the code to place on your site is very easy, and the interface is similar to Google Adsense. One interesting wrinkle that distinguishes YPN from Adsense is that they also allow you to select ad categories for the ads to show on your website.

There are 20 high level categories that you can choose from (Apparel and Jewelry, Automotive, B2B, Books-Movies-Music-Tickets, Computing, Education and Career, Electronics and Appliances, Entertainment and Social Event Services, Financial Services, Flowers and Candy, Health and Beauty, Home and Garden, Mass Merchants, Professional Services, Real Estate, Reference, Sporting Goods, Telecommunications and Internet Service Providers, Toys and Hobbies, Travel) and each category has a few subcategories.

Once I set up the code, I inserted a few lines of javascript, and I was good to go. The first thing that struck me was that it took a few days for the contextual targeting to start. As I recall, Adsense was much quicker to show targeted ads. Once the targeted ads started to appear, I was a bit disappointed. Perhaps half of the ads were well targeted and the other half seemed like junk. I have been running the ads for a few weeks now, and while the targeting has improved slightly, it does not match the quality of Adsense’s targeting.

Unsatisfied with the contextual ads, I attempted to enter some content categories into the system to improve my site’s performance. None of the categories were a perfect match to my site, so I choose one that was the closest. While the category reduced my click through rate, my revenue per click nearly doubled. If your site is a good fit for one of the YPN content categories, I think that you could do very well with the program. I was also disappointed that YPN does not break out statistics by the ad category. Showing statistics by ad category and sub category would be a huge help in selecting the best categories for your site.

For one of my sites, the click through rate on my YPN ads was 68% lower than Adsense, and my CPM earnings were 42% lower than Adsense. Of course, your results may very. If you content fits one of the YPN content areas, I would spend some time testing the program to see if you can improve your earnings.

After having one of my sites banned from AdSense, I decided to test a number of alternate advertising programs. AdBrite (aff link) was the first program that I tried. AdBrite sign up is quick and painless. As soon as you are accepted to the program and place the code on your site, you can start displaying run on network ads. You can also enter tags to your site, which will help advertisers find your site. The run of network ads were acceptable, but not great. Ads relating to MySpace and educational sites performed best on my site.

I ran AdBrite ads for about a week, and my click through rate was close to ten times lower than my AdSense click through rate for the exact same space. Revenue per click was half of what I was earning with AdSense. Needless to say, I will continue my search for AdSense alternatives.

Despite my lack of success with AdBrite, I think that it could work very well for some larger sites. If advertisers are frequently asking for space on your site, AdBrite could be a hassle free way to manage your inventory. I would be very interested to hear about any AdBrite success stories out there.

I have had some decent success with a handful of advertising and affiliate programs. Here are five programs from which I have made at least a $1,000.

Websponsors – One of the first affiliate networks that I had some good luck with. For a while, I was making a ton of money off their free poetry offer that paid out at $1.00 per lead. Lately, I have had some success with their free student pack offer that pays out $.60/lead.

AdSense – I have done well with AdSense since its inception. I would like to do some more testing to optimize AdSense on my sites, and I will chronicle the results of the testing on this blog.

Adteractive – Adteractive is another good affiliate network. I have had some success running their FastWeb scholarship and JackPot offers on a few sites that I helped with finding good affiliate offers.

EmarketMakers – Their free stuff and contest offers have produced for me. They have a large selection of offers.

CommissionJunction – I have not run any CJ programs in a long time, but I made some nice money on offers for internet accelerator software and romance books a while ago.

While compiling this list, the one thing that stuck out at me was that I have had a variety of different types of advertising programs earn me good money. The key was just taking the time to ferret out the good programs and offers that fit well with my audience.