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!

TL;DR

:2 cents:

very good tutorial man.. thanks !
.

Awesome post. I might try it. :thumbsup

I love it when I see this. Five characters that mean "I am an illiterate moron, and I want the whole world to know it!"

I get that some people can't read, but I'll never understand why they are proud of that fact and like to advertise it on discussion forums.

What's funny is, anybody that's too lazy to read a few paragraphs of info-dense text couldn't benefit from the information in it anyway, because they'd be too lazy to put it to use. So, no loss.

Who's gonna read 3 pages of your ref link spam?

Fuck you.

Somebody who wants the benefit of my experience? Fuck you right back, dumb-ass. :321GFY

You're hurting your own brand, too, which only makes this more funny. You expect people to believe you are expert at something when 16-20 paragraphs of text makes your brain hurt? Hint: informed people typically read that much while they are pouring their first cup of coffee for the day.

==============

Moving rapidly along, my thanks to everyone who had kind words for the guide. I hope it helps somebody make a little extra cash, and I'm not the least bit ashamed if my pocket gets padded in the process.

Good for you! Thanks for sharing. Very interesting. :-)

Cheyenne

Anything forkbeard posts is of good use, I have bought advertising on his sites many and many of times, and they have always done excellent, any advice from him is excellent as he does very well with his sites.

So he puts in a ref code for giving good information.

A Good thread to bookmark!

You're on the fucking internet, 99.9% of the shit you do is reading, if you can't read a 3 fucking paragraph post then go back to playing with your shiny pennies you dumb cunt.

Thanks Fris, I appreciate the endorsement. :thumbsup

This is a worthwhile document that we will probably post to the JuicyAds website. There is a lot of excellent information here, and a lot of great suggestions.

Honestly, if someone puts this much work into a post, I think they are more than entitled to post their ref code. :2 cents:

http://img300.imageshack.us/img300/4176/retoxjosh.jpg

You're an unemployed ginger retard. Go hit the gym, you fat fuck.

Oh, man, that was "expert" work on that rebuttal!

good stuff

Nice post :thumbsup

Iv been using Juicy Ads and have had all the ads sold out on one site for the last 3 months now I think and what I do like about it, is you can use the revenue earned from your publishers account to buy ad spots ..All good stuff

nice post. i'm definitely going to hit them up and give them a try again

Bingo :thumbsup

I love Juicy Ads.... Been using them for about six months and making good coin using them. Very happy. Plus, Tiger who runs it is always easy to contact if I have questions....

So who's fake nick are you?

Its in bad taste that someone makes an intelligent business thread .. which is pretty rare .. and it turns into a personal attack.

C'mon... just stop it.

Aw, I was enjoying the free bumps. ;-)

Plus, people who complain about text on discussion forums is one of the funniest things on the internets -- it never fails to make my day.

What does he need your great information for. He is an SEO Expert. His nickname says so, therefore it must be true....

Either its a complete moron. Most likely a fake nick though.

Great post. Wish there was more like this on here.

it's bad taste to make an intelligent business thread.

We buy a lot of JuicyAds.

If you have all your ads sold and want to do a direct deal please contact me.

very informative thread Forkbeard, thanks for sharing all of that great info!! I recently started using JuicyAds just a few weeks ago in fact and some of the points/suggestions you made I will put into use no doubt.

That was an awesome post. Finally someone contributes something and some troll shits all over them for it.... no wonder no one ever contributes anything useful here anymore.

:2 cents:

That's always been the culture here at GFY, it just used to be that it didn't slow anybody down. Even the business threads always had some robust exchanges that made the GFY emoticon very useful: :321GFY

But lately, there does seem to be a lot more trollery for its own sake, I can't argue with that.

Thanks again for the kind words about the post everybody!

@ SEO,
You sound like the person who kick me off their site two days ago saying the price i paid was too low.

Let me see, your site - RON ads 1 click a day = $0.30 month
My Ads on your site - 100 clicks a day = $18.00 month for your site when i'm gone.

The info Forkbeard posted is a slam dunk!

@ forkbeard,
PM me yur sites and maybe I'll place an ad with you if the ad size is right.

Thanks Tiger for posting this link on Juicy Ads.

Got to love Juicyads, signed up as an advertiser, logged in to create campaigns 24 hours later, the account had been closed :1orglaugh

Never had anybody (mainstream or adult) closed my account for any reason whatsoever.

No campaign had started, CC was in my name, so really the only reason I can think of is the IP.

Somebody should tell Juicyads many successful webmasters live in third world countries, the reason they can live in a third world country is often BECAUSE they are successful. So not such a good idea to cut them off :2 cents:

A guy calling himself SEO Expert ripping on someone for creating a long and descriptive post about something. Only on GFY... :1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

LOL, you are right!

If it was your credit card, then why did the cardholder call me, asking why we charged their credit card? They asked me for a refund, and I closed the account that the fraudulent charge came from. Pretty simple.

I was on vacation when I got the call, I remember it very clearly.

I have explained this situation every time you make this same complaint post, and you never bother to read it.

Dude it was one year ago and was paid with my sponsor issued payoneer card. :upsidedow

You must be thinking about somebody else because the only "explanation" I was ever given was to hit up some guy to get an explanation. And since I never did, how would you even know which one was my account?

Anyway, won't post in a juicyads thread again, live and let live, blacklabelads are happy with the extra business :thumbsup

A great way to get premium placement on quality sites
 

This article is dead on!

I use Juicy ads to sell my premium ad space on http://www.amateurs411.com and http://www.realitysexreview.com - this is a very affordable way to get a top level premium link at a very affordable rate (1 cent or less per click, who can beat that!)

A the support team is great and very prompt. A great service to explore if you are not already doing it.

Tropicool

This deserves a bump.

click here to advertise on nasty.com via JuicyAds :pimp

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

Quick! Somebody call...THE TROLL HUNTER!

http://www.eroticadollars.com/for-ho...oll-hunter.jpg

Jay, I forgot to say thanks for putting this out on your twitter feed. And I'm flattered you found it useful.

And, happy new year to all! (Shit, have I really been on GFY for almost eight years now?)

About nine hours ago I had an advertiser log in and renew $285 worth of advertising across five different sites. That's advertiser loyalty!

Now here's a nice way to wake up on a Monday morning! My mail client kept spewing mails from JuicyAds -- "You sold an ad!"

By the time the cash register stopped ringing, I'd sold $545 worth of new advertising in five ad zones across three websites.

As I said in one of the "The Sky Is Falling In 2010!" threads, 2010 is going to be the year in which internet advertising starts to trend back up. And that's got positive implications for ad brokers, domainers, and anybody with traffic.

nice tutorial man.. thanks !

Thanks for the great tutorial. I already had an (unused) JuicyAds account, but your tutorial is making me take another look at them.

You're welcome!

Today I'm afraid I abused poor Jay's patience, sending him an elaborate bug report that was classic PEBKAC: "Problem exists between keyboard and chair." He was very nice, sent me a deadpan "This is user error" response followed by a gentle reminder of the (most basic) step I neglected in setting up my ad zone. By rights he should have mocked me mercilessly, but he's too professional for that.

Somebody asked me for JuicyAds advice today so I decided to necro-bump this thread, since I needed to re-read it anyway.

It's held up well. About the only thing I'm changing my mind about is the power of zones on inside pages. Advertisers don't understand them; they'll buy inside-only zone that sits right next to the all-pages-of-the-site-zone, and then slap the same banner on both, which is ugly as sin and destructive of click rates.