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.

The recent posting of Facebook’s allegedly non-existent advertising rate card provides insight into the company’s monetization strategy.

Some of my doubts about Facebook’s ability to monetize their platform were fueled by recent reports of abysmal performance for bulletin advertising (0.04% click through rate). Facebook users are relatively sophisticated, and they just don’t click on conventional advertisements, or even the Facebook specific bulletins. So how will Facebook generate revenue to justify the lofty valuations being tossed around by the media?

According to the rate card on Valleywag, Facebook offers sponsors heavily branded placement on brand-specific groups (e.g. The Dave Matthews Band Group). They pitch the service as a way for brands to connect with Facebook members and inject some viral potential into their marketing.  The list price for the branded groups is $150,000 for three months. Currently, Facebook has 150 of these groups. If this numbers stays constant, they will be looking at $90 million in annual revenue.

If you add in some premium banner placement, the fixed banner ad deal they are getting from Microsoft, bulletins, and poll revenue, and then we are talking about some very promising numbers. I will be watching closely to see if Facebook can continue to grow their advertising base in proportion to their user growth.

I think Facebook would benefit from delving into the CPA world a little bit more. Myspace must be making a killing with their relatively new ringtones section. They are probably earning at least $10/signup for the ringtone promotion with Jamster. With some creative promotion, Facebook could be the uber super affiliate. For example, Facebook knows when students are graduating, and they know that many students will be moving when they graduate. By presenting targeted offers related to moving to a new location (moving services, insurance, internet service,etc.), Facebook could make a killing. Very few services have as detailed demographic and behavioral data that could be leveraged for innovative monetization.

Facebook ratecard at Valleywag.

I was signing up for a Photobucket account the other day, and I was quite surprised by their aggresive attempt to monetize new signups. On the registration screen, you are asked to provide your cell phone number. If you enter your cell phone number, a pre-checked bx appears which reads “Yes, I would like my chance to win a new HDTV or a $500 Starbucks gift card and other great prizes from Bid4Prizes.”

If you keep the box checked, a text message with a “coupon code” will be sent to your phone, and you will be asked to enter your “coupon code” on the next page. If you enter the code, you will be charged $9.99/month to be a member of Bid4Prizes. Bid4Prizes is a cell phone based auction system owned by the same company that operates the popualr mobilesidewalk ringtone affiliate program.

Photobucket is making at least $7.50 per user who enters a coupon code. They are probably making even more based on the significant volume they are driving to the offer. Considering the relatively young demographic of Photobucket’s users, I am sure that they are generating a ton of signups, and there are probably some surprised parents out there looking at cell phone charges from Bid4Prizes. According to the May Photobucket newseltter, they are registering 85,000 new users per day. If the offer converts at 1% of new users, they are generating over $2.2 million dollars in revenue per year from the offer.

This monetization strategy is very aggressive, and it will be interesting to see how long Photobucket maintains the practice.

Last week, I was checking my stats for some offers I was promoting via AffiliateFuel, and I noticed that one of my steady performing offers had simply stopped converting. I contacted my affiliate manager immediately and explained to I expected to generate 40 leads with the number of clicks I sent to the offer.

My affiliate manager did a great job looking into the situation,  and determining that the offer landing page was messed up. Within a few days, I was credited with the 40 leads. I know that all affiliate networks should work this way, but I am always impressed to have a situation like this handled without any major headaches.

In my post about about how to monetize unused domains, I mentioned that I was experimenting with redirecting a typo domain. The domain is blinkco.com which is a typo for the ringtone company blinko.

I have seen a drastic improvement by redirecting the traffic to the blinko affiliate program on azoogle. The previous owner was using Sedo to monetize the domain. This earned him approximately $0.13 per visitor. The affiliate program redirect has earned my over $0.40 per visitor over the first month and a half. This equates to $430 CPM. The traffic volume is not huge, but it is a nice additional revenue stream. I will keep my eyes open to apply this technique to more domain names.

Here are two posts on affiliate marketing that  caught my attention.

John Chow has some good ideas about the proper way to do affiliate marketing. His big empahsis is on pre-selling affiliate offers. In my mind, I view this as giving the offers context. In his example, he promoted affiilate programs as “hot deals.” This gave viewers on his technology site a reason to be more interested. On some of my sites geared towards less savy/younger internet users, I have had success positioning the offers in a free stuff or special offer section.

As a follow up to my Lazy Man’s Guide to Tracking PPC campaigns, this is a great post about using Google Analytics to track campaigns. I did not realize that you could pass information to analytics in the javascript to help it segment your traffic. This may not be helpful for tracking affiliate traffic to networks, but the idea has me thinking of some interesting applications.

Shawn Collins writes that the Attorney General of Florida is investigating deceptive practices of ringtone affiliate marketers. The part that stands out to me is when he mentions that they are concerned about people who marketed the offers as “free.” Although practices have changed recently, marketing the offers as free was a common practice. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

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.

Here are some great monetization related posts that have bubbled up in my feedreader lately:

Vizu just launched a new service where they pay you to post polls on your site. You provide some basic demographic information for your site, and they will pay on a CPM basis for placing the poll on your site. This could be a great strategy for some of the quiz sites or even my friends who run a popular teen site, Kiwibox.com.

One of the blogs that I found off of the wickedfire forum has a good post about calculating confidence intervals for your PPC campaign performance. This is the best way to statistically prove if your initial campaign results are statistically meaningful, or if you need to continue testing your campaign. When I get around to building out the MonetizeTraffic tools section, I am thinking about a quick and easy interface to calculate confidence intervals. If you want to geek out on stats, you wikipedia has some good info.
I really liked this post on Earnersblog about combining blogger accounts with social bookmarking promotion to drive easy affiliate sales. The posts mentions using Bookmarking Demon to automate the bookmarking. The software looks very cool, but it is $97. To do it on the cheap, you might want to check out Delicioso which has less features but is free.

I have been working with HydraMedia for a few months now, and my experience so far has been very positive. Their biggest selling point in my mind has been their strong affiliate support. My affiliate manager April is very easy to get a hold of via email or IM and she always has been able to answer my questions. The support at some of the other affiliate networks has paled in comparison to Hydra.

Positives

• Affiliate Support. My affiliate manager is in regular contact via email and IM, and she has been very proactive about suggesting offers that will work well for my methods of offer promotion.
• Variety of Offers. Hydra has a nice mix of free offers and credit card offers. In total, they have close to 1,000 offers. Their payouts are usually competitive with Azoogle and other CPA networks. I have also been impressed with the fact that they seem to have a few new offers every week.
• Net 15 Payment. Their prompt paypal payments have been excellent so far.

Although I have been very satisfied with the service, there are a few Opportunities for Improvement:

• Too Many Email Only Offers. It drives me crazy when I find a good offer only to see that it is for email promotion only.
• Reporting Functionality. Their reporting leaves something to be desired. You can only create reports on all activity for a given day range and you can not run reports for a specific offer. I usually end up just exporting the reports to a csv and then manipulating them.

Overall, HydraMedia has been great to work with, and I highly recommend that you give them a try.

Here are two good posts related to website monetization.

Making Money In the Mashup Economy – An interesting post over at GigaOm about how some companies are monetizing all of the mashups that you see springing up all over the place. One key take away is that many of the people selling tools and services related to mashups are the ones making money. However, there is a great example of hypemachine which allows users to sample music. They monetize the site via links to the apple itunes affiliate program and advertising sales. I could also see them selling feature spots on the homepage to push certain artists. This might be a bit shady, but it could be a nice way to make some money and the payment could be disclosed.

Ringtones Experiment – BlueBobbo got tired of reading in all of the forums that the ringtone market is saturated, so he decided to run a test PPC advertising campaign. The results were surprisingly positive. I love test like this which dispel common myths. It just goes to emphasize that you would always be testing.