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Using Kontera To Increase Internet Business Revenue

47 — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 20:49:50 +0000

Would you like an easy way to increase the earnings of your websites? Then think about joining Kontera for their in-text contextual advertising network. In case you don’t know what an in-text ad is, it’s an ad that looks like a regular hyperlink and is triggered by the content of a webpage. Except that it’s got a double underscore instead of a single underscore and when you put your mouse over it a small advertisement box is shown. Kontera runs one of the most popular in-text ad networks out there. I’ve never liked those types of ads all that much but, well, I like money more than I dislike the ads

Signing Up

I’d considered signing up with Kontera for a long time and hadn’t gotten around to it until a month ago. In-text contextual ads seemed like, potentially, a painless way to boost earnings on some of our sites by a couple of percent. Especially since you can run Kontera and AdSense on the same website without violating anyone’s terms of service. How well they would work was up in the air but I figured the only way to know was to test them myself.

Signing up wasn’t a big deal. If you’ve joined AdSense, or AdBrite, or Commission Junction, or any other affiliate program then you know the routine (your name, your company’s name if any, address, website URL, etc). It only took about 10 minutes after reading through the terms of service.

Once the signup phase was over I got the javascript code to paste into the HTML for my website. That brings up one thing I don’t really like about their service. Each individual website needs a different set of javascript code for showing the ads. For some reason, I have no idea why unless it’s for quality control or something, they won’t let you use the same code on different websites. All of my other advertising networks and affiliate programs don’t care so I wasn’t really happy about that. Oh well. I guess I’ll just deal.

I’ve forgotten the details now but I don’t remember it taking very long until their ads were shown. One thing I noticed was that there was a little bit of extra space after the ads. It might be something with my stylesheet. I haven’t tried to figure it out and it wasn’t bad.

Are The Ads Relevant?

One of the things I was most interested in was the ads themselves. Without relevant ads there’s no way you’ll get a decent amount of clicks. I thought it might take a little while for their targeting engine to understand the content of our website. Normally, it takes time for Google AdSense to start showing the most relevant ads too. Kontera seemed to do a decent job. Some of the ads were worthless (just sent the double underlined keyword to a 3rd or 4th tier search engine) but some of them were awesome. One ad I saw in particular was just as relevant as any AdSense ad that shows on that website.

Old School Stat Tracking

A really screwy thing is that they don’t have real-time stats. Sometimes it updates the next day at 11:00 AM on the east coast, sometimes it’s 11:25 AM, sometimes it’s 1:05 PM. Basically, I have no idea and that’s annoying. I’m a stats junkie and, while I don’t mind a delay of a few hours, waiting until the following day seems ridiculous. At least they show you the most common keywords triggering ads and which pages on your website they appear.

Earnings As A Publisher

Regardless of all of those things, the real measure of success in is the earnings. That’s been kind of a mixed bag. It’s done better than I thought eCPM-wise but it still isn’t a lot of money (the AdSense eCPM was about 16x the Kontera eCPM). My guess is that the niche makes a big difference and that’s why you see such a wide range of results here. I’d think a product oriented website would do well but I don’t have experience with Kontera on a website like that yet. I’ve seen enough to think it’s worth testing on a few other sites though.

Earnings As An Advertiser

It’s strange but $0.02 clicks still exist. I know because we’ve gotten some. In fact, if you’ve got products to sell or an affiliate site then you might seriously consider advertising on Kontera. I have no idea what the conversion rates would be but you can get some seriously cheap clicks with them.

Affiliate Program

You’re also eligible for a small referral bonus if people sign up after you invite them. I say eligible because the referree has to have 50,000 impressions within the first two months for you to get paid $25. I doubt most people make much money from their affiliate program that way. After you’ve been with them three months and are earning at least $100 each month, you’re eligible for an affiliate link. That’s actually a much better deal. You’ll get 10% of their revenue for the first year for those referrees. Nice.

Neat Experiment

One last thing I like to mention is an excellent post by Randy Brown on maximing AdSense revenue using six sigma principles. Randy runs a very successful website getting advertising revenue from Kontera and the three major contextual networks (AdSense, YPN, and AdCenter). He’s doing experiments on boosting his revenue and blogged about part of a study. It was really, really interesting because he found that AdSense revenue had no correlation to Kontera revenue. In other words, putting both of them on your website doesn’t make earnings drop with either. He makes upwards of $75,000 from his main website with contextual advertising so there shouldn’t be any issue with a lack of data points for statistical validity.

Final Thoughts

Anyway, I’d give Kontera a try if you run any kind of content website (whether it’s a blog, forum, or static content website) with your internet business. It’s painless to add and does what they say. Kontera gives you supplemental revenue and every little bit helps. Anyone already advertising with AdWords, YSM, or AdCenter should definitely check them out too.

47
Waiting for Kontera to give me real-time stats.

Removing AdSense Increased Landing Page Revenue A Lot

47 — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 18:35:32 +0000

Should you put AdSense on your landing pages? There’s probably a way to make it work but my experience says no. I’ve noticed a lot of new people do it and so did we. The thinking goes “hey, if I don’t make a sale then I might get an AdSense click.”

Here’s a good example of why you should at least find out what happens without it. We were testing a campaign a few months ago and thought our landing page was the reason our conversions were low. The landing page only had a single AdSense block on it but its CTR was over 10%.

I didn’t really want to give up the Google money but threw caution to the wind and removed it. Our eCPC was higher for conversions than for AdSense clicks (big surprise). I was just hoping some of those AdSense clicker people would convert.

Results

	Dates	Impressions	Clicks	Conversions	Conversion Rate	CTR	Revenue
With AdSense	February 1 to 21 (21 days)	1,413	297	21	7.07%	21.02%	$69.14
Without AdSense	February 22 to March 12 (20 days)	1,633	546	43	7.88%	33.44%	$111.80

AdSense Suckage

We obviously came out ahead (62% ahead). I was most interested in the conversions per impression (rather than the slightly increased conversions per click) when I analyzed the results. After all, I’m paying for those impressions regardless of what action a visitor performs. That’s the part that blew me away at first. We got 105% more conversions from only 16% more traffic. Wow, that’s some serious AdSense leakage.

Building Better Landing Pages

You can deduce a landing page design lesson from this too. Don’t give people too many choices. Funnel them to the action that you really want them to take.

Helping AdSense Show Relevant Ads On Your Site

47 — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 23:40:56 +0000

One of our sites shows completely unrelated AdSense ads at times. Part of the problem is a single irrelevant keyword. Googlebot finds over 100 total keywords but fell in love with one bad one for some reason. It is only in the content twice, compared to dozens of times for the relevant keywords, but Google does not seem to care. I do not want to change the content because it makes sense to a human.

Fortunately, the AdSense Help Center shows how to filter away keywords so there is a way around this. What I did was tell it when to stop looking for content by doing this in the HTML:

content

This is similar to using negative keywords in an AdWords PPC campaign to filter out searches where you do not want your ad to show. You can also tell Google when to start looking for your content by doing this in your HTML instead:

content

It will take a little while for this to take effect but hopefully it solves one of problems with irrelevant ads. Maybe everyone already knows this, but it is a neat little trick.

How Do You Monetize A Low Traffic Site?

47 — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 21:31:57 +0000

A strange thing happened with Niche Site 1. It went live, we forgot about it while working on other things, and then it started getting a trickle of traffic. This amazes me. I mean, the site has almost no SEO (bad), is on a new domain (worse), and has no links to it (terrible). Or so I thought.

Google Webmaster Tools gave me some clues as to why it did not just die in cyberspace. The site is very detailed and has a lot of obscure words. Googlebot loves it. To be fair, it was created for some super non-competitive keywords but the site ranks high for words and phrases I never imagined. The unique, detailed content thing is something we can really apply to other sites.

Now we have an interesting dilemma. How do we monetize a low traffic site? Using AdSense or some other contextual advertising program is probably a waste. Getting enough clicks to make even a dollar would take forever. Another concern is that the ads displayed may not be relevant because searches for this niche often show the wrong results. Making a single sale of an affiliate product could make a decent amount of money though. Most of the time when people visit the site they look around some so a few related affiliate products might catch their attention.

What else could we do? I am not sure yet. It will never be our main focus but the site might be worth a second look and a few creative ideas.

Mini Marketing Experiment

47 — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 02:10:51 +0000

We put up Niche Site 2 a few days ago. The potential market for that niche is a bit larger than for Niche Site 1, so it is a good place to try out a few mini experiments. It should be easier to get some good data points with the higher traffic. A few possible areas for promoting and differentiating the site include:

Interface – Many of the competing sites look just alike and are not all that visually pleasing. Playing around with colors, graphics, and layouts to see what jumps out at people could be lots of fun.
Features – It has at least one desirable feature that we have not seen often (or ever). This is a chance to practice writing sales copy talking up that feature.
Community – Some of the better competitors included a community aspect to get visitors more emotionally attached to the site.
Freebies – The site consists of two pieces: a front-end presentation piece and a back-end data piece. One thought was to give away the back-end via a simple interface or an Application Programming Interface (API). Developers could use it like shareware (maybe in exchange for a link on their site or donation).
Blogs and Forums – Writing about and/or linking to a site in blogs and forums is always mentioned as an easy way to get traffic.
Ads – There are several related products that a visitor might purchase. Knowing which ones, how many, and where they should go instead of just using AdSense is another good place to tinker.