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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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 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.