I have been thinking a fair bit about what I want to do with the Partners advertising, what is working and what could do with improving. The ease which people can sign up and advertise seems ok but I would like to simplify things somewhat further, I think the main thing will be have the ads just image based, see more on that in a second. From the publisher side there are still many publishers without paid ads.
I’m looking at the following options (which are not necessarily exclusive)
1) CPM ads where people buy X impressions across a category
2) CPA ads with better targeting than our last test
3) Textual ads
Textual ads would possibly attract advertisers who are put off by image ads. I’m not entirely convinced there is a market for these that is not already well served.
CPA will be easier to test as it does not require finding an advertiser to try it out, plus there are options where a single commission could bring the publisher $5, $10, and up, enough of those and I think we will all be very happy. CPM ads might well be popular but also might not be, I would have to try it and see but I think we all would like to see revenue sooner rather than later.
There are two selection options for CPA, the publisher chooses which ads to display or I choose and the publisher rejects. Many bloggers tell me they like the advertising to be auto pilot, particularly those with several blogs. Some tell me they don’t visit this site or read this blog and so wouldn’t know ads were available. At the same time there are bloggers who would want to vet any ads BEFORE they appeared. It would be unworkable with roughly 4000 blogs in the partners network now to book CPA ads individually. Perhaps the solution would be “reject before 48 hours is up otherwise it shows”? Obviously this all ads logic that slows everything down and adds to development time.
I’m also looking at losing the rollover. As well as simplifying the advertisers job as mentioned earlier it would also allow publishers to place the code at the end of the HTML before the closing body tag and have the ads display anywhere on the page. This will allow any ad layout you want plus will not hold up page execution if anything goes wrong.
Let me know your thoughts on all this or any ideas you have.