06.13.06
Do In-Text Ads Really Work?
Kontera is an advertising firm based out of San Francisco offering contextual, in-text ads to publishers looking to earn additional revenue from their site. Their in-text ads differ from more standard AdSense-type ad blocks, as they are actually embedded into your own text, linked to words which match the context of your entire article to an ad.
I recently began inserting Kontera in-text contextual ads into my blog articles and am testing the results. First off, I should say that Kontera has by far the best customer support I have ever experienced. Less than ten minutes after completing their online publisher application form, my phone rang — it was Lainne from Kontera confirming my application and welcoming me into the program. Not expecting to hear back so soon, let alone by phone, I was completely shocked.
After registering, I was assigned a personal account assistant who has guided me through the entire process of configuring my account and inserting the ads into my site. He also thoroughly tested my site under various platforms to reassure me that adding their Javascript tag would not break any part of my site.
So what does Kontera provide? Well in this very article, you should see certain words highlighted and double-underlined — these are sponsored links. When you move your mouse over these words, a small balloon with an advertisement appears; When you move your mouse off the link, the balloon quickly goes away. These links are automatically inserted by the Kontera Javascript code which you need to insert, similar to how AdSense is set up. They are selected by analyzing the context of your article and finding the best fit for you. That is, this is a contextual system. From the discussions with my personal account assistants, I have been told that although linked words are performed automatically, as a publisher you have the ability to block certain words from being chosen, and also can block certain sections of your page from being activated, such as a nav bar, etc.
Whether these in-text ads will produce a high CTR and eCPM, I have yet to find out. I will test them out for a few weeks and write another followup article later in the summer — hopefully with some solid results on how well in-text ads perform vs. more standard text ad-blocks. I will also closely be watching the relevancy of these ads to the articles they appear in. Google’s AdWords is so popular (and also so profitable to publishers) because nearly 100% of the time the ad displayed is right along the same lines as the page it is displayed on. This to me is the most important part of a contextual ad system, even more so than CTR and eCPM. Your readers don’t want to see non-relevant ads, and without an audience, your site is nothing. Don’t ever forget that.
For now though I’ll give Kontera a shot and we’ll see how it goes…
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Perhaps my caffeine intake is low today, but I can’t seem to ferret out one important fact. Does the Kontera offering find its own keywords to make live (contextual) or can the blogger/site own select them manually (non-contextual). It’s important to know since a contextual solution can’t be run on the same page with AdSense. The product does look good, though, it’s ‘zippy’ enough … as long as you don’t have too many users with Java turned off.
Hey Dave,
Sorry about the confusion — yes, this is a contextual solution meaning that there may be issues with using the Kontera service & AdSense at the same time. Google can be quite picky when it comes to their service agreements so be careful.
I’ve noticed these types of ads turning up on a few sites that I visit regularly. I personally find them to be much more annoying than AdSense ads because you can easily mouseover a linked word without realizing it (especially if you use a scroll wheel mouse) and thus have the ad pop up without your intention. This is almost as annoying as blinking text IMHO.
Big D has a good point…I’ll be looking forward to reading about some results over time with this new publishing venue. Thanks for the article, I’m glad I subscribe via RSS!
Big D,
That’s a very good point, and a concern that I have with inserting these ads. I’d appreciate anyone’s input on the “annoying factor” about these in-text ads. I will still test it for a few weeks and give my report on the results.
The first time I saw them, I found them to be very anoying because I didnt expect them to be there. When I knew they was there, I actually got curious about what was hiding behind them. It’s an interesting conecpt, and as long as visitors dont treat the site as a spam site because of them, it can actually be a good thing. I Iook forward to Matts report in a couple of week.
My initial experience with Kontera was good. I signed up and within days I had tags and was earning a couple of bucks a day from one site with high CTR and eCPM. Then I asked for tags for other sites, they responded pretty quickly saying that they would send them in 5-7 days. Two weeks later I am still waiting and not getting any replies to the followup emails.
I do notice that they seem to monitor and respond in blogs and forums. Maybe this is the best way to reach them. Hi Guys!