I'm looking at selling my own adverts and I have advertisers wanting to give me their money and copy.
Does anyone know of a system to automate that stuff?
What I'm looking for needs to have:
* Allow advertisers to upload copy and request an advert slot.
* Allow an advert slot to be time-based regardless of number of impressions (1 month in a slot that rotates 10 adverts).
* Send me an email when a slot has been booked so that I review the advert against the end user agreement (that it's not abusive, totally inappropriate).
* That I can approve an advert and then it sends a message to the advertiser with an invoice and requesting payment.
* That the advertiser then pays via Google Checkout, PayPal, etc.
* That after all of that the advert goes live for a scheduled period of time.
* That the advertiser can see impressions, stats and reports letting them know the success of their campaign.
* It should look professional and ideally be themeable/skinnable or self-hosted so that I can make it seamless (the advertisers want to deal with me... I want to reduce my work).
Basically... aside from me approving the content I want a system that hand-holds the advertiser through the whole process and shoves the advert on the site and just gives me the money at the end.
I have 4.5 million page views per month, on a very strong community website.
What I've seen out there that does part of the above doesn't do the whole story... I'm quite willing to pay to get the above.
I'm probably just not googling for the right terms, what should I be looking for?
At the moment I'm leaving money on the table because my time and sanity is more important to me than the money. I realise that this isn't the best business sense and so either I find some tool to help me, or find the time to build one myself.
One thing that is very important to understand when selling ads on your own is how those ads are actually sold. Depending on your site, the niche, and how much time and effort you put into the ad sales process, results can vary greatly. At the end of the day, the only thing that REALLY matters is if ads are sold or not sold. Software alone, in my opinion, won't get the job done. With roughly 2 and a half years of data from running BSA, less than 20% of ad sales come from a publishers website directly - sure, some sites are higher and some are lower, but 20% is the average (and we're in a tech savvy space).
One of Arn's sites, for example, came into BSA with a handful of ad sales. And, once we worked with him and his team on pricing and marketed the site to our existing advertiser base in the iphone niche, his sales soared. I don't know the exact numbers, and I doubt Arn would appreciate me sharing these here - but it's safe to say that his ad sales at least tripled once he joined BSA. In this case, it wasn't the software, it was our ability to sell ads for his site.
The point I'm trying to make: there are a billion ad networks out there. Do some research on them before using them, try some out, and find the ones that sell for YOUR site the best. And, if you can sell ads on your own, do it - hard code them into the site, have people pay you via PayPal, and use a network to supplement those sales.
Would be interested in exploring opportunities to work with you guys on ipodtouchfans.com (site in same space as arn's). My email is username at gmail.
Sweet, glad you're in. And definitely let either of us know if have any feedback. We've even been running occasional batches of usability tests, if you're open to going through the onboarding process with one of us.
I said "request to buy" instead of just "buy" because being able to approve an ad before it runs is an important part of direct sales (#3 in your wishlist of features). Building in those kinds of checks while improving the overall process has been my main usability challenge in my 6 months or so here.
OIO-Publisher is available as a WordPress plugin or stand-alone and is quite powerful. It has all of the features you've requested except stats for the advertiser.
I haven't checked it in detail against your requirements, but at the very least if it doesn't do what you want, it'll give you the terminology to search for things you can spend more money on that do what you want...
Unfortunately the downloadable product seems to be close to dead. There have been serious security problems that have not been addressed for many months. Take a look at the forum to see what I mean. Their server side product must be their focus.
That's a shame. I'd heard good things about it in the past. I believe Google are investing in their admanager product with the doubleclick acquisition, but I haven't heard anything about it recently: https://www.google.com/intl/en_US/dfp/info/welcome.html
Do you find that self service ads pay significantly more than remnant advertising/ad networks? I know that a negotiated direct sale will pay several multiples of what AdSense will, but do the self service ads come close to that?
With adsense I was making a very poor return as click-through rates were quite low (it's a discussion forum).
However I've got some advertisers really pushing to get in front of the audience for page impressions and exposure rather than click-thru.
Basically the market I have is niche, and represents the largest site on a given subculture (fixed gear cycling). This subculture happens to be very cool at the moment so even beyond those wishing to advertise bike products to the community I've been approached by EMI Music, Adidas, Puma, etc all to put adverts on the site.
I was going to just operate an intra-community rate to help support the cottage industries (sole traders who make custom courier bags for example) at a low rate. But now I've got very large brands wanting to put adverts on the site it's beyond the amount I can control, yet they are perfectly happy paying full market rate to get the brand exposure into this hard to reach niche crowd.
So basically... for me, for my site, self-serving is incredibly lucrative.
It's just that I have a full-time job, am doing an MSc in the evening, run several web-sites and am trying to keep a social life intact and a partner happy. So whilst self-serving is lucrative my trade-off is that time for my is very expensive. So I need as near to full automation as possible to take all this lovely money off the table and to put it into the community coffers.
I'm estimating it's worth at a low-end GBP 500 per month, and at an upper end GBP 4k+ per month if all of the slots are purchased by large brands. So yes, it's way in excess of what AdSense click-throughs will generate, and all because those who want to advertise on my site value exposure and eyeballs more than click-throughs... we're just hard to reach.
Because I don't need a salesperson, I need an administrator. And what needs administrating is something that can be done easily by some software... so why demean someone by making them do a highly repetitive and dull task?
I am working on a SaaS ad server, it has much of what you want but doesn't have full self-checkout and self-service just yet. It does reduce the rest of the work though so if you are interested drop me a line (in my profile).
Does anyone know of a system to automate that stuff?
What I'm looking for needs to have:
* Allow advertisers to upload copy and request an advert slot.
* Allow an advert slot to be time-based regardless of number of impressions (1 month in a slot that rotates 10 adverts).
* Send me an email when a slot has been booked so that I review the advert against the end user agreement (that it's not abusive, totally inappropriate).
* That I can approve an advert and then it sends a message to the advertiser with an invoice and requesting payment.
* That the advertiser then pays via Google Checkout, PayPal, etc.
* That after all of that the advert goes live for a scheduled period of time.
* That the advertiser can see impressions, stats and reports letting them know the success of their campaign.
* It should look professional and ideally be themeable/skinnable or self-hosted so that I can make it seamless (the advertisers want to deal with me... I want to reduce my work).
Basically... aside from me approving the content I want a system that hand-holds the advertiser through the whole process and shoves the advert on the site and just gives me the money at the end.
I have 4.5 million page views per month, on a very strong community website.
What I've seen out there that does part of the above doesn't do the whole story... I'm quite willing to pay to get the above.
I'm probably just not googling for the right terms, what should I be looking for?
At the moment I'm leaving money on the table because my time and sanity is more important to me than the money. I realise that this isn't the best business sense and so either I find some tool to help me, or find the time to build one myself.