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The recent CPA beta test we ran across the Partners network is now over. It was a great success in terms of it’s purpose: To determine if CPA ads as backfill for unsold ad space was a viable option for publishers.

The answer is YES.

There were many lessons learned in this brief test, cheif among them being that targeting needs to be sharper, and we’re very appreciative of our publishers help in both testing the ads, and providing awesome feedback.

With that feedback, and the knowledge gained from running the test, we’ll be looking to run phase 2 shortly — it may not be what you think, but it will be interesting, and hopfully lead to a more rewarding program for publishers.

Those that have earnt money from the test will be notified on the next payment run.

Thanks again everyone, I hope to have a similarly productive conversation with the next phase of testing as we strive to make Partners work for as many publishers as possible!

As reported by Darren over at Problogger, we’re to beta “Network Ads” next week. This is to address the challenges many publishers face in securing those all important first paid ads.

Network Ads are very simple. They’re CPA (cost per action) ads that fill your unsold ad space untill a regular advertiser wants that space for herself. Initially the creatives will be limited to around a dozen fairly “universal fit” brands/products to test the system, and help us fine-tune targeting for categories, and in some cases individual blogs in the Partners network.

How they work

• Network Ads will appear on your site in place of “empty slots”, but below paid slots.
• Network Ads are CPA – Cost Per Action. This means that you get paid if a reader clicks through on the ad, then buys something from the destination site
• Much greater detail on creatives and payouts will be available next week at launch.
• Payout is the same as for regular ads. A simple 70/30 split between publisher and Performancing.
• Initially, ads will be “universal fit” so that we can run the brief test across the entire network — we’ve chosen the best performaning ads, but more accurate targeting will come in the next beta phase.
• Again, initially, features will be very limited. We want to collate some data first to help us determine what kind of features we need to put in place ot help our publishers profit from this. Please bear with us for a few days…
• There is no guarantee you will earn money. If your site is very low traffic for example, this may not work well for you. All the normal traffic building tips you can find here and at Problogger.net and other sites apply 🙂

How to opt-out

If you really don’t want to participate, then we’ll be sorry to hear that, but have provided an easy means for you to opt-out of the system entirely — Just go to “my blogs” and edit your blogs to say no to network ads.

Questions and comments welcomed

Though I think I’ve managed to cover most of it, if you have questions or comments they’re most welcome so please drop them in the comment box below.

Thanks everyone!

Though I’ve no doubt there will still be some work to do (see below if you have not received payment..), payments finally went out last night to those of you still missing November cheques.

My sincere apologies for the delay. We had some ‘paypal issues’ that were out of our hands but appear to be finally resolved.

If you think you’re missing your payment

First, please double check your emails (payments are made to the email account in your performancing profile). If you really think you’re missing payment, then please comment here, or email [email protected] and let us know and we’ll giet it fixed for you today.

On a happier note…

Im pleased to say this was our biggest payout to date, good job guys, and good luck for December!

Many of us don’t have killer Photoshop skills. We have been hearing from Partners Advertisers that they need an easy way to put an ad together without having to hire a designer, with an emphasis on “ease” and “speed”. Taking this feedback on board we have built a new system for Performancing Partners; “Easy Ads”.

The launch of Easy Ads also marks the official opening of Performancing Partners to advertisers. We’ve been open to publishers for a couple of weeks, and have even been taking orders from advanced advertisers, but now we feel we’ve got all the advertiser features and tools in place and are ready to start pushing that side Partners.

Easy Ads has one mission, and that is to create a text based graphic to draw attention and click throughs. Because of this simple goal there is just enough flexibility to do that, and only that. While there are considerable branding benefits possible with graphical ads (and it’s always been possible to upload 125×125 ads on the system), what you are aiming for is to get attention enough that the visitor will roll over the ad, see the hover box and click.

To create an ad you simply type your text in the first box and use the formatting tools just like a word processor or PFF, setting the colours, alignment, border, font and font size. The live preview will show you exactly what the finished product will look like. When you are happy you can move on to the next screen where you choose your rollover text and destination URL, etc.

As a first stab at this we think it works pretty well. Feedback from beta testers was positive but of course we need to know what advertisers make of it. It is after all there to be useful! Please do take it for a test drive and tell us what you think?

Please take Easy Ads for a test drive and tell us what you think!

Over the last year of Performancing, we’ve built some cool tools, posted some killer tutorials and built a community of over 26,000 professional bloggers. Not bad for a company started from virtually nothing.

It’s not been a year without lessons though, and of all the many lessons we’ve learned running a transparent community based company, the biggest is “get your business model sorted early”. We’re just starting to bring in money as a company, and this is good, but to survive, and mature as a startup we need to look at areas that are draining resources while not producing income.

Killing Metrics

The biggest pull on company resources is Metrics. Our pro-grade blog analytics service. It currently has around 16,000 registered blogs using it, and though it’s cool, it’s not producing.

There is no other blog analytics program out there that can scale as Metrics was built to. I remember MeasureMap showing signs of buckling under just a few hundred users but it takes a lot of bandwidth, and 3 very high grade servers to run the current system.

At this stage, and in the current climate of “free” everything, I’m neither prepared to put ads on it nor charge for it — What’d I’d like to do, is to give Metrics to the community by making it Open Source, or sell Metrics to a company with more financial resources that could continue to develop it, and benefit from the usebase.

We’ll decide for sure in the next week or so, but our current hosting agreement ends mid december and the decision has been taken to not move Metrics over to the new servers in it’s current state.

I will let you know more about this when the details are finalized. If anyone has ideas of what to do with Metrics, then please post here, or contact me privately ast [email protected]

Monetizing Archives

With two major feature releases that will see Partners, our up and coming blog advertising network become more useful to publishers without ads yet, and easier to use for advertisers, our focus is tuned to giving that service the time it needs to mature, and to grow — We’ve no doubt it will become a great source of income for us as a company, and the bloggers who particpate in it, but it will take a little time.

One of the things we can do is to monetize our archives. We’ve always said that that’s where the money is anyway right? 🙂

So, over the next few days I’ll be working on putting a contextual ad service on posts, aswell as show our own Partners ads on all pages of the website — showing our own ads will put us in the same boat as our publishers and will hopefully provide us with some valuable learning experiences from your side of the equation aswell as produce income for the company.

Moving forward in 2007

The tighter, leaner and more profitable Performancing will consist of the Partners network, and our #1 blogging editor Performancing Firefox (which by the way, now has around 350,000 downloads!).

I hope you, the Performancing community, will understand the need to trim and streamline our services, and that you’ll support us and help us by making suggestions and letting the blogosphere know that we’re looking for help.

Comments and thoughts welcomed as always.