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Forkbeard · 12-29-2009, 10:01 AM

Several months back I started using JuicyAds very successfully to sell ads on my higher-quality blogs, after repeated problems with other ad brokers. In the spirit of giving back (not to mention spamming my refcode link) I decided to share a few things I've learned.

First, a description: JuicyAds is a back-to-basics ad broker. No contextuals, no pay-per-click, nothing fancy. You set up ad zones, you make them available for sale, advertisers can buy ads in your zones. You have the option of running your ads in the unsold slots or Juicy's run-of-network ads, but if you run your own, the run-of-network ads will still rotate into your slots 25% of the time. You do get paid for clicks on the run-of-network ads, although the formula for such payments is obscure (there are stats showing clicks and amounts, but no obvious way to tell why you got paid so many cents for so many clicks. I'm sure Jay would explain if I asked him, but I've never bothered.)

Now for the interesting part: Pricing. You, of course, set your own prices -- either flat rate or using a dynamic price that is fixed-to-the-buyer but set dynamically based on your target price-per-click. So you can say "$150 a month for that ad" or you can say "two cents a click for that ad" and the system will present a price of $138.90 based on recent click history of the ad in that zone -- which might be $122.20 or $151.70 next week as the click history changes.

Whichever pricing you pick, the rate sheet shown to the buyer shows the price to the prospective buyer both en grosse and as an estimated cost per click. The recent click-through percentage is shown to publisher and advertiser alike, which is great because it aligns the incentives. Publishers have a good incentive to place zones in premium placement areas, because crappy zones will have crappy stats and high cost-per-click. While advertisers have good incentive to use attractive creatives, since they pay a flat rate for the spot but can get a better deal if their creative outperforms the creatives that generated the pricing/CTR stats for the zone.

I advertised this as a guide, so here are some of the tips I have learned for maximizing publisher revenue. I run adult blogs that get relatively low volumes of fairly high-quality niche traffic, so I'm focused on controlling the quality of the surfing experience and not having junky off-message ads and zones. These tips might not work if you are trying to monetize tube or TGP traffic, I dunno.

Zone Design Tips

Running blogs as I do, I'm faced with the usual location choices with respect to the front page (How much of my premium above-the-fold inventory do I want to offer? Can I get decent click through on ads in non-premium spots?) plus the problem of how to monetize that huge "long tail" of inventory on thousands of low-traffic inside pages. The visible CTR stats at JuicyAds are a harsh mistress -- if your zone doesn't get traffic and clicks, the low quality of it will be instantly evident to potential buyers. What I've learned is as follows:

1) "Front Page Only" zones aren't a good idea. There's a lot of low-attention bounce traffic on the front page of a blog -- somebody clicks through, sees nothing new or one new post, and leaves. That leads to awful click through ratios even with great creatives.

2) "Inside Page Only" zones work better than you would think. The individual page traffic numbers are low, but overall, it ads up -- and far more people on those pages are there out of specific interest, and thus viewing with more attention. This is your Google Image Search traffic, and if the ads are themed similarly to the images you tend to publish, you're actually monitizing it for a change.

3) If you must have "front page" zones, use zones that appear on the front page and every inside page of the site. That way the inside page CTR numbers will support the overall CTR numbers, and it maximizes the total traffic number for the zone. You won't get the best CTR numbers, but they'll be good enough to sell, and you can sell to the large subset of advertisers who thinks (as I did before JuicyAds taught me different) that front page advertising is premium advertising.

Making the CTR Statistics Work For You

One of the biggest problems with any network that reports CTR statistics is that the publisher controls the placement, but the advertiser controls the creative. And when the creative sucks, the CTR goes down. Now, JuicyAds at least offers an incentive for good creatives (beat the historical CTR and get a better cost per click), but as you all know, that's not enough. There are advertisers who deliberately run ugly creatives, plus plenty who don't seem to know how to optimize an underperforming creative. I'll get advertisers running a .2% CTR ad in a zone where I normally get 2% CTR, and they'll run it month after month. That drives down the overall CTR stat for the zone, which means either a lower price on the other ads in the zone if I'm pricing that way, or a higher displayed estimated cost per click if I'm offering non-dynamic, flat rate pricing.

There are two ways to handle this:

1) Make sure that your in-house ads are especially clicky. This should be easy; you know your traffic better than anybody. If the goal is to sell ads, you don't care as much whether clicks on your in-house ads are high-performing. Put up eye-candy banners and keep them up. Your CTRs will look really good and will bolster the zone stats against one underperforming but steady-paying ugly creative. Not getting the CTR you want? Keep trying! Feedback is real time, if an ad isn't working after a couple of days, tweak it or replace it. Eventually you'll find ads that consistently deliver high click through ratios; running these ads will give your zones very attractive stats.

2) Only run one ad per zone. True, running multiple ads per zone is useful because they display in random order, so a column of the same ads will look different each time it loads. But if you break that column up into four one-ad zones, then you can defend yourself against an ugly creative -- just run attractive house ads in each zone and set flat rates that make the per-click estimated cost very appealing. An advertiser with ugly creatives will get higher per-click costs; his choice to pay happily, improve his creative, or move on, but he doesn't drag down your pricing or stats on the other ads, however he chooses. And when he does move on, your clicky in-house ad that automatically pops up in the empty space will swiftly rehabilitate the stats for the zone he crapped all over.

(Running one ad per zone also solves that intermittent display bug that sometimes eats the margins between ads in the same vertical zone. Temporary tip, since Jay will eventually find and squish that bug I am sure.)

Managing Run Of Network Ads for Quality:

The run-of-network ads (the ones that show in your unsold zones) are heavy on the usual low-quality advertisers (penis extenders, fake pills, not-as-free-as-they-claim cams, that sort of thing.) However there are some quality advertisers in the mix, and as a publisher, you can go through and exclude any run-of-network advertisers you don't want on your site. This is not a perfect solution, because the interface for excluding advertisers in bulk is very primitive: you have to click once and wait for the page to refresh before you can click to exclude another. And if a new low-quality advertiser joins the network, his ads will start showing until you notice and exclude him. Finally, there's no granularity: if you exclude an advertiser, his ads won't show on any of the sites in your JuicyAds publisher account -- there's no way to exclude the penis pill sellers from your flagship site but allow them on your trashier sites.

The two main ways to manage RON ads for quality are:

1) Price all your own ad zones to sell. RON ads DO NOT rotate into sold ad space. Problem solved.

2) Limit your ad zones to softcore or tamer. JuicyAds lets you restrict advertising to "softcore" or "no nudity" or even "non-adult", and most of the low-quality RON advertisers have fairly attractive softcore ads, or else don't advertise on softcore sites. Softcore tends to be less "trashy" if visual quality of your site is important to you. I haven't had a problem getting good click-throughs with well designed softcore ads, so I don't see a downside.

Final Bonus:

Even after years in the business, I've always been weak on metrics. Using JuicyAds as a publisher has taught me an enormous amount about ad placement, clickability, and the behavior of my own traffic. So much so, in fact, that I'm finally getting into the game that's made so many of you rich: buying traffic and monetizing it with my own purchased advertising. I'm still an utter newbie, but I'm making a profit in my first little dabbling forays. And that was a bonus benefit I never expected out of becoming a JuicyAds publisher!

12-29-2009, 10:01 AM
Forkbeard Confirmed User Industry Role: Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: I Roam Around Posts: 2,236	Guide To Using JuicyAds (for Publishers) Several months back I started using JuicyAds very successfully to sell ads on my higher-quality blogs, after repeated problems with other ad brokers. In the spirit of giving back (not to mention spamming my refcode link) I decided to share a few things I've learned. First, a description: JuicyAds is a back-to-basics ad broker. No contextuals, no pay-per-click, nothing fancy. You set up ad zones, you make them available for sale, advertisers can buy ads in your zones. You have the option of running your ads in the unsold slots or Juicy's run-of-network ads, but if you run your own, the run-of-network ads will still rotate into your slots 25% of the time. You do get paid for clicks on the run-of-network ads, although the formula for such payments is obscure (there are stats showing clicks and amounts, but no obvious way to tell why you got paid so many cents for so many clicks. I'm sure Jay would explain if I asked him, but I've never bothered.) Now for the interesting part: Pricing. You, of course, set your own prices -- either flat rate or using a dynamic price that is fixed-to-the-buyer but set dynamically based on your target price-per-click. So you can say "$150 a month for that ad" or you can say "two cents a click for that ad" and the system will present a price of $138.90 based on recent click history of the ad in that zone -- which might be $122.20 or $151.70 next week as the click history changes. Whichever pricing you pick, the rate sheet shown to the buyer shows the price to the prospective buyer both en grosse and as an estimated cost per click. The recent click-through percentage is shown to publisher and advertiser alike, which is great because it aligns the incentives. Publishers have a good incentive to place zones in premium placement areas, because crappy zones will have crappy stats and high cost-per-click. While advertisers have good incentive to use attractive creatives, since they pay a flat rate for the spot but can get a better deal if their creative outperforms the creatives that generated the pricing/CTR stats for the zone. I advertised this as a guide, so here are some of the tips I have learned for maximizing publisher revenue. I run adult blogs that get relatively low volumes of fairly high-quality niche traffic, so I'm focused on controlling the quality of the surfing experience and not having junky off-message ads and zones. These tips might not work if you are trying to monetize tube or TGP traffic, I dunno. Zone Design Tips Running blogs as I do, I'm faced with the usual location choices with respect to the front page (How much of my premium above-the-fold inventory do I want to offer? Can I get decent click through on ads in non-premium spots?) plus the problem of how to monetize that huge "long tail" of inventory on thousands of low-traffic inside pages. The visible CTR stats at JuicyAds are a harsh mistress -- if your zone doesn't get traffic and clicks, the low quality of it will be instantly evident to potential buyers. What I've learned is as follows: 1) "Front Page Only" zones aren't a good idea. There's a lot of low-attention bounce traffic on the front page of a blog -- somebody clicks through, sees nothing new or one new post, and leaves. That leads to awful click through ratios even with great creatives. 2) "Inside Page Only" zones work better than you would think. The individual page traffic numbers are low, but overall, it ads up -- and far more people on those pages are there out of specific interest, and thus viewing with more attention. This is your Google Image Search traffic, and if the ads are themed similarly to the images you tend to publish, you're actually monitizing it for a change. 3) If you must have "front page" zones, use zones that appear on the front page and every inside page of the site. That way the inside page CTR numbers will support the overall CTR numbers, and it maximizes the total traffic number for the zone. You won't get the best CTR numbers, but they'll be good enough to sell, and you can sell to the large subset of advertisers who thinks (as I did before JuicyAds taught me different) that front page advertising is premium advertising. Making the CTR Statistics Work For You One of the biggest problems with any network that reports CTR statistics is that the publisher controls the placement, but the advertiser controls the creative. And when the creative sucks, the CTR goes down. Now, JuicyAds at least offers an incentive for good creatives (beat the historical CTR and get a better cost per click), but as you all know, that's not enough. There are advertisers who deliberately run ugly creatives, plus plenty who don't seem to know how to optimize an underperforming creative. I'll get advertisers running a .2% CTR ad in a zone where I normally get 2% CTR, and they'll run it month after month. That drives down the overall CTR stat for the zone, which means either a lower price on the other ads in the zone if I'm pricing that way, or a higher displayed estimated cost per click if I'm offering non-dynamic, flat rate pricing. There are two ways to handle this: 1) Make sure that your in-house ads are especially clicky. This should be easy; you know your traffic better than anybody. If the goal is to sell ads, you don't care as much whether clicks on your in-house ads are high-performing. Put up eye-candy banners and keep them up. Your CTRs will look really good and will bolster the zone stats against one underperforming but steady-paying ugly creative. Not getting the CTR you want? Keep trying! Feedback is real time, if an ad isn't working after a couple of days, tweak it or replace it. Eventually you'll find ads that consistently deliver high click through ratios; running these ads will give your zones very attractive stats. 2) Only run one ad per zone. True, running multiple ads per zone is useful because they display in random order, so a column of the same ads will look different each time it loads. But if you break that column up into four one-ad zones, then you can defend yourself against an ugly creative -- just run attractive house ads in each zone and set flat rates that make the per-click estimated cost very appealing. An advertiser with ugly creatives will get higher per-click costs; his choice to pay happily, improve his creative, or move on, but he doesn't drag down your pricing or stats on the other ads, however he chooses. And when he does move on, your clicky in-house ad that automatically pops up in the empty space will swiftly rehabilitate the stats for the zone he crapped all over. (Running one ad per zone also solves that intermittent display bug that sometimes eats the margins between ads in the same vertical zone. Temporary tip, since Jay will eventually find and squish that bug I am sure.) Managing Run Of Network Ads for Quality: The run-of-network ads (the ones that show in your unsold zones) are heavy on the usual low-quality advertisers (penis extenders, fake pills, not-as-free-as-they-claim cams, that sort of thing.) However there are some quality advertisers in the mix, and as a publisher, you can go through and exclude any run-of-network advertisers you don't want on your site. This is not a perfect solution, because the interface for excluding advertisers in bulk is very primitive: you have to click once and wait for the page to refresh before you can click to exclude another. And if a new low-quality advertiser joins the network, his ads will start showing until you notice and exclude him. Finally, there's no granularity: if you exclude an advertiser, his ads won't show on any of the sites in your JuicyAds publisher account -- there's no way to exclude the penis pill sellers from your flagship site but allow them on your trashier sites. The two main ways to manage RON ads for quality are: 1) Price all your own ad zones to sell. RON ads DO NOT rotate into sold ad space. Problem solved. 2) Limit your ad zones to softcore or tamer. JuicyAds lets you restrict advertising to "softcore" or "no nudity" or even "non-adult", and most of the low-quality RON advertisers have fairly attractive softcore ads, or else don't advertise on softcore sites. Softcore tends to be less "trashy" if visual quality of your site is important to you. I haven't had a problem getting good click-throughs with well designed softcore ads, so I don't see a downside. Final Bonus: Even after years in the business, I've always been weak on metrics. Using JuicyAds as a publisher has taught me an enormous amount about ad placement, clickability, and the behavior of my own traffic. So much so, in fact, that I'm finally getting into the game that's made so many of you rich: buying traffic and monetizing it with my own purchased advertising. I'm still an utter newbie, but I'm making a profit in my first little dabbling forays. And that was a bonus benefit I never expected out of becoming a JuicyAds publisher! __________________ Offering sponsored blog posts and custom writing services.