Balanced Advertising
If you have never heard of balanced advertising, don’t worry about it because it is a term I coined recently to describe what I am doing to fix something I see within the text exchange industry, that I believe is bad for everyone involved, except perhaps those operating the exchange.
Most ad exchanges offer multiple types of advertising. Click on a banner and you earn xx amount of credits. Click on a text link and you earn a different amount of credits, hot links, solos, header ads, footer ads and a huge arrangement of different types of solos from any one of a dozen or so networks. Every text ad exchange determines their own number of credits and or cash offered for each type of advertising and prices charged to the advertising customer is usually higher on ad types the give the clickers the most points.
All of that sounds perfectly normal and to be expected, but you only need to use a high quality tracker, that allows you to include sub ID’s and it is easy to see where the advertisers are taking a beating because of this type of system being in place in virtually all ad exchanges.
Over the past few weeks I have done extensive testing to see how well various types of advertising pull in ad exchanges and the results actually surprised me because two things stood out in glaring form.
First I noticed there are exceptionally few people that click on anything other than solos. Secondly, is that the network solos get clicked about 10 times as often as other types of solos.
From the advertisers stand point, it is obvious network solos are the way to go, at least on the surface, but on the other hand, it means almost all other types of advertising being offered is almost worthless. I watched banner after banner eat through 100′s and 1000′s of views with 1 or 2 clicks if I was lucky. The same held true with top and bottom solo ads, hot links and traffic links. PTC links got their 50 to 100 clicks they were due, but that is to be expected when people are getting paid to click.
The other things I noticed is that within the networks, there are way to many people that are in almost all of the programs using the network. I saw one ad get 2200 clicks in a network ad, but when I looked at the number of different people that were seeing the ad (based on ISP address), there was only 57 people that actual saw the ad. That is almost 39 times that each of those 57 people saw that ad.
I personally like people seeing my ad multiple times, but since I also know by my tracking that not a single sale was made on that ad and it makes it obvious this is not a good thing.
The cause of the problem was obvious, the people seeing the ads are mainly clicking on the types of ads that give them the most credits. Considering it is common to see solos paying 3000 credits a click in the same exchange that only pay 20 credits per click on hot links and traffic links, it is easy to see why people ignore the lower paying clicks.
Knowing this it was easy for me to see what had to be done. All types of clicks have to pay the same amount or people are going to ignore the lower paying ones, basically making them worthless. That is exactly what we did with Goldmine Ad Exchange.
All clicks at the Goldmine pay 100, 300 or 500 credits per click depending on what level membership you have. It does not matter whether you are clicking a network solo, regular solo, text ad or traffic link, you earn exact the same when you click on them.
As our membership grows and all of our members learn they earn the same amount no matter what they click, we will see much higher click rates on all types of advertising.
One other major thing happens with this system. It greatly decreases the amount of credits you need to trade for ads because there are not huge differences in credits that have to be paid out. This alone should put an end to solos costing 2 Million credits.
I think you will begin seeing more and more exchanges starting to bring the credit value of the various types of clicks closer together because having all these various type of advertising choices available is worthless if no one is clicking on them. I will continue to run checks on how things are going and update you when there is more info available.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 13th, 2011 at 1:55 am and is filed under Training Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
