Tuesday, 28 November 2006

Types of users

Currently, we are seeing 3 categories of users. There are users who signed up but do nothing. We guess that this is a normal situation with most websites, since there are going to be a percentage of users who just sign up to explore the site, but end up not making use of the service. At this point, it seems that the conversion rate is reasonable and there are no cause for concern.

The second category of users are users who signed up and make use of our service to place free advertising on other websites. However, these users have not paste an Adleaf to their own website. In essence, they are violating the rules of the community and are leeching on the free credits they get on sign up without reciprocating. Our first thoughts was to terminate the accounts for these users since we have the technology and editors to filter out the violators. However, we realize that the problem would take care of itself since once the user used up their free credits, their advertising will stop showing since they will not earn any new credits.

The third category are those who live up to the spirit of the community by faithfully adding their Adleaf to the site and also posting their own advertising on others. These website owners are thus helping each other advertising without having to spend extra money. The problem for the websites that receive very little hits is that eventually their credits run out since the network is showing more impressions than they can earn them. Since our goal is to help the long tail acquire traffic, we do credit the good quality sites with more credits on a case by case basis.

Technorati Tags:

Posted by caven at 7:28 PM in Happenings
Responses (0)

Tuesday, 21 November 2006

Pay Per Post

There had been recent activities in a new paid advertising category which is Pay Per Post (PPP). PPP allows a blogger to be paid for writing about a company’s products or services. In many cases, bloggers are also required to put a link to the advertiser website. This is really similar to product placement in the movie industry, video gaming industry and even sometimes printed media. Therefore, we are not talking about anything new here. However, PPP has generated quite a huge controversy as it calls into question the authenticity and independence of the blog. I submit that readers should be skeptical about the content they read anyway these days even with reputable printed media. It really remains to be seen on how the startups such as ReviewMe and PayPerPost plan to shape the PPP industry. We have personally used one of the service ourselves. However, we have been disappointed by the quality of the content generated (even though positive) and it was clear that the bloggers are writing to make a really quick buck. I have no doubts that PPP will become an integral part of advertising in future. Pay Per Click (PPC) model is still the 800 pound gorilla of internet advertising. Click fraud remains a problem for the PPC model. Also, if an advertiser is not aware of the conversion rate, they could just be throwing money away into a black hole.

Pay Per Action (PPA) is the way to truly guarantee a transaction based on advertising. Ultimately, advertisers do want choices. An advertiser with a high conversion rate because of its product or service may favor PPC over PPA. An advertiser with a lower conversion rate may want to have a PPA model.

Technorati Tags:

Posted by caven at 7:53 PM in Advertising
Responses (0)

Sunday, 19 November 2006

Features and directory listing

Finally completed and tested some of the new features including the addition of 3 new advertising formats that incorporates the Leaderboard and Skyscraper format. We also enhanced the Adleaf dashboard to provide better statistical web data to members.

Once an Adleaf member put an Adleaf code onto their website, they seldom come back to the site as there were no real reasons before to revisit the site. This week's focus was to try to enhance the Adleaf site so that there is a reason for members to come back to revisit the site. To achieve the goal, we have enhanced the Dashboard to allow members to check their site statistics and understand their web traffic better. Nothing innovative here except that we are adding more capability to Adleaf to make it even more useful to members beyond just getting free advertising. Our plan is to add various web traffic statistics that matter to our members. Just covering the basics here until we get to work on more innovative product features. We also added a directory listing for Adleaf members.

Technorati Tags:

Posted by caven at 2:21 PM in Advertising
Responses (0)

Sunday, 12 November 2006

More free advertising formats...

Worked on adding new formats to Adleaf free advertising network. Added the 728X90 Leaderboard, 120X600 Skyscraper and 160X600 Widescraper. We syndicate our ads from various sources such as Adbrite and Google Adsense for our excess advertising inventory. Recently, Adbrite had been undergoing technical changes to deliver better contextual advertising so that their ads are better targeted. Well, I think they need to revisit their architecture because their ad delivery system is snail slow...slooooowww...It is hurting our member publisher's experience since you can see a 1-3 seconds delay before the advertising shows up. Hopefully, Adbrite realizes that their ad delivery system is really performing very badly from a performance and latency standpoint. This also proves that Google is still really king of scalable architecture and system as contextual ad delivery is a hard problem. To sift through massive amount of data at high speed is no trivial problem.

In terms of contextual advertising, Google still beats the rest handsdown as far as what I can see in terms of click thru rate (CTR). I am seeing a factor of 5-10X CTR difference between Google Adsense versus other networks and yes-that means a factor of 5-10X difference in revenue per ad impressions which is a huge deal! Perhaps more on that some other time.
Posted by caven at 10:21 AM in Advertising
Responses (0)

Tuesday, 7 November 2006

Incentives for better ad placement

When our members run out of impressions credit, we typically award them additional impression credits based on the number of impressions and number of clicks that they have been generating for this free advertising community. However, we also realize that certain members have place their Adleaf in obscure positions on their web page. Since click-through is ultimately what drives traffic to a website and not impressions, it is critical that we create incentives for our members to place their Adleaf in more prominent position so that it increases the chance of being seen and thus for the ad to be clicked upon.

Our plan is to roll out a new feature which awards a member additional impression credits using an algorithm that factors in both the Adleaf placement position on a web page, the number of non-fradulent impressions and clicks generated. Previously, our editors would run through logs and view member's webpages to determine the number of new free advertising credits to award to members whose impression credits have run out. However, as our community grows, it has become non scalable and a better algorithmic approach is required.

Posted by caven at 8:57 PM in Advertising
Responses (0)

Monday, 6 November 2006

Ad dimensions

According to Nielsen Netratings, the most popular ad dimensions is the 728X90 leaderboard. This is followed by the medium rectangle (300X250) and wide skyscraper (160X600). Adleaf currently supports the full banner (468X60) and medium rectangle (200X200). We plan to add to the configuration portfolio a much wider range of ads with different dimensions to cater to the different placement and design by our community. We have initially provide the ability to customize the dimensions of the ad to support a infinite combination of ad size. However, we decided to follow the industry standards as it was easier to display the wide variety of creatives in a much more appealing fashion.
Posted by bloguser at 9:41 PM in Advertising
Responses (0)
« November »
SunMonTueWedThuFriSat
   1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
2627282930