There’s an old saying in marketing that 50% of marketing works and 50% is crap - but no one knows which 50% works and which 50% to ditch. Thankfully we aren’t totally in the dark, and we’re not without tools to learn how to increase our percentages of valuable ad placement and ad design.
With the advent of more and more targeted ads around the web, the competition for viewers attention grows more aggressive every day. A main aspect of that competition is the appeal of each ad for the quality of its product and the visual appeal of the presentation of that product in a 150px square space (for instance). In order to understand the potential of such a small space, we’re taking on a study of the role of visual design in increasing click rates for targeted advertising.
We’ve partnered with Matthew Smith at Squared Eye to learn more about the return on investment for strong design. In addition to detailed content and interface design Squared Eye runs Pattern Tap, an organized library of web design inspiration. Pattern Tap has been working with BuySellAds.com from its beta beginnings, and has seen quite a few ads of different types and ranges listed on the site. Matthew recently approached us to learn more about the relationship between different kinds of ad design and the related click through rates.
We will be using sample data from billions of impressions, millions of clicks, and thousands of different creative units to bring advertisers some actionable advice for when they are designing their ad units.
Stay tuned… we will be publishing the results here on the BSA blog.
One of the challenges for advertisers working with BSA is finding the right placements. Our inventory is growing daily, and despite the nice sliders and new categorization, it is still sometimes a bit of a challenge and process to go through all of our inventory. We receive requests daily from advertisers asking for recommendations on which sites to advertise on, etc. Therefore, it only made sense to automate this a bit more on our side. Now, when we are asked for recommendations, not only do we make them for the requesting advertiser, we also make them for other advertisers at the same time. No, this doesn’t mean that we’re doing any sort of “bulk” recommendations or automated recommendations and just dumping them into advertiser accounts. These are hand-picked recommendations with each specific advertiser in mind.
What does it look like?
When you go to the Buy Ads page, if you have recommendations you will see a notification at athe top of the page:
When you click on a recommended listing you will then see which zone we have recommended:
This highlight will also show up on the listing detail page:
That’s it, straight-forward and simple. If you would like us to make some recommendations for you, please fill out the form here: http://buysellads.com/support and select “I am an advertiser and would like a proposal.”
What do you think? Do you have any suggestions for improvements to this feature?
When you receive money as a publisher it is held in a “pending” state for the first 72 hours.
All this means is that you will not see this amount reflected in your account balance and you will not be able to cashout this amount nor pay for ads with it (with the new pay with accont balance feature) until after the 72 period has passed. Each hour we check for payments that should be released and if it has been 72 hours we release them. Why? It’s a necessary check and balance type system to help us prevent abuse. We are the only ad network to release funds to publishers this early and we felt like waiting 3 days vs. our original 0 days isn’t asking that much.
You can pay for ads with money from your BSA account.
Many of our publishers also do some advertising, so this is a way for us to help keep things simple. When you go to checkout you will see an option to pay via “Account Balance”. In addition to being able to pay with Account Balance, we have also added the ability to “Deposit Funds” into your BSA account and you can then use those funds to buy ads. This was necessary to help us get around a PayPal issue (gosh aren’t there always PayPal issues) where you need a credit card backing your account in order to subscribe to a subscription. It’s also a nice way for advertisers to upload a single amount of money into their BSA account at the beginning of the month and then draw from that balance for ads (whcih means one transaction for your accountant to worry about vs. various).
Publisher Dashboard > Details
Publishers can now see stats on how their advertisers ads are performing. You can find this view by going to Publishers > Dashboard and then next to your site title clicking on the view details link. We do plan to incorporate an aggregate graph and view of some stats on the actual dashboard. There are more improvements to come on this page.
Overall
This is just the first step of the iteration process. We have a lot more that we’re working on right now and this was just our first “push” of new stuff. There is definitely more to come. If you have feedback about anything, please use the support form on the site: http://buysellads.com/support
We have just taken the new version of BSA live. We have the TTL’s set pretty low, so hopefully your DNS is snappy wherever you are. If you’re still seeing the maintenace page from the old site then your DNS has not yet updated. Rest assured, this will not affect your website(s) and any ads that are live - the ad server is very much separated from the live site.
That is all the news we have for now. If you run into an issue please DO NOT post a comment here, please follow normal support procedures and submit your query/issue to support@buysellads.com or use the form on the site: http://buysellads.com/support. We will be monitoring the site closely and will post more info about the new version later this week.
…and are now officially open for business. During the private beta period users were being approved only after a manual screening. While we’ve done quite a bit of business despite our private beta status, we hope this will make the process easier for advertisers and publishers who are a good fit for the system and just want to get up and running. However, to help maintain control and quality over our inventory we will be approving website properties before they are able to sell ads and be listed in our inventory.
Some interesting stats in case you are curious…
We’re currently serving just over 300 million ad zone impressions per month.
This translates to well over 1 Billion actual ad impressions per month.
How’s the new version coming?
We posted a few weeks ago about the new version of BuySellAds.com that we will be launching this quarter. It’s coming along nicely, here’s a sneak preview of another screenshot from the new version (homepage):
If you are interested in writing a blog post about the new version once it is launched, please let us know and we’ll give you advanced notice of the launch.
