It has now been rougly four months since I started serving Kontera’s In-Text ads on CyberWyre and think that it’s about time that I review my experience with them so far.
Overall, my experience with Kontera has been very positive. I was impressed right from the start with their very personal support, which continued throughout the past four months. My personal account representative has called me a number of times to check on my status, and has always responded quickly to any questions or issues that I have had.
I have updated the Highest Paying Keywords page using the Google AdWords tool. It seems that nothing much has changed over the past few months. From what I found, the term “Austin DWI” is still at the top hovering around $83/click with loan consolidation and auto insurance quote keywords closely following. I will update the list again in a few weeks and see if it has still stayed the same.
The top 25 search terms on the list are pasted below:
Most site authors, and statistics packages out there are concerned with number of viewers, and number of page views, however they never really touch on one of the most important statistics: page views per user. How often do your visitors simply come and go, leaving your site as fast as a TV channel surfer? Are you encouraging your visitors to stay for a while and click through multiple pages? If you are able to take your average viewer from 1 page view per visit to two page views per visit, you are effectively doubling your page views. It’s all a numbers game — the more ads you serve up, the more you will earn — and you just doubled your potential.
So how can we increase our page views? Here are a few helpful tips that I have followed myself and you might want to try as well:
1. Use the “More” tag to split your posts
Using this feature will benefit your site in two ways: if you tend to write lengthy posts as I do, it will help to clean up your home page and allow your readers to view more than one article headline at a time. It will also greatly increase your page views by nearly a factor of two. In my log files, I can pinpoint to the exact day that I started using this feature, as my page views per user ratio increased by approximately 80%.
Well I have taken some time to review the results of my experiment and I’ve actually had a hard time determining if it was successful or not.
My goals from this experiment were to: 1) generate organic traffic to my site, and 2) make money. Breaking down my analysis into these two goals, we get the following:
Goal #1: Generate Organic Traffic
When I was initially planning this contest, I had thought that the offer of $50 for a simple link-back to my site would bring dozens of entrants. “What’s a 30-second link for a chance at 50 bucks?”, I was thinking.
I promoted this contest on Digg, del.icio.us, numerous forums I frequent, and on CyberWyre of course. In the end, I received only six entrants, from which a winner was selected.
There will be no increased organic traffic from only six link-backs. As such, the first goal to generate traffic through increased link-backs failed.
There aren’t too many things out there that are better than free money. Money that you don’t have to think about. Money that every month will be there whether you work for it or not.
Sound like a dream? Well it’s actually not too hard to get some of your own “automatic money”. These days with the popularity of web services and RSS feeds, there is plenty of dynamic content out there for you to input into your own blog and provide your users with some sort of up-to-the-minute live data streams for them to browse.
Still not sure what I’m talking about? Take a look at my Current Top 15 Internet Searches page. Every month I get hundreds of visitors who searched for the term “WWE” and reached this page, which by the way has a Page Rank of 4. Does CyberWyre have anything to do with World Wrestling Entertainment Inc? Nope, but I do get a lot of traffic from it, and banner clicks too.
Although RSS is supposed to be the latest and greatest spam proof way to convey a message to your readers, not everyone is used to this new medium yet. You may have a very interesting blog and many readers who would like to receive updates, however they just simply don’t know what RSS is or want to bother with it.
Everyone has email; Heck, even my grandfather is using email, but if you were to ask him what RSS feeds he subscribes to, he’ll just look at you funny. People have trouble with change and getting used to new concepts, so why not make it easier for them to visit your website?
Adding an email subscription field (as can be seen on the top of every page on CyberWyre) for users to receive blog updates via email is a great way to increase page views. More page views = more income. Remember, it’s just a numbers game.
I have updated the Highest Paying Keywords page again with the top 500 highest paying keywords and have pasted the top 25 below. It seems that not much has changed since the last update – keywords for legal & loan services are still the most expensive, and somewhat disturbingly “Austin DWI” is the most expensive keyword @ $82.95/click.
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…
What makes blogs so unique from static web sites is the option for user interactivity through comments. It is the goal of every blogger that their entries spark a heated discussion in the comments forums on their site. Increased user interactivity will help to increase the number of repeat readers your site receives – coming back to check for updated comments, new poll statistics, etc, which cannot be found in your RSS feed. Each of these visits is a new page view and each of these has the chance of clicking through one of your paid advertisements. Remember, it’s all a numbers game.
Yesterday I added a new feature to CyberWyre, the CyberWyre Poll. This will permanently rest in the sidebar of the site and contain the current reader poll – I’d like to encourage all of you to participate. Adding a poll to your blog serves to add one more level of user interactivity, beyond simply comments. Bloggers love statistics and numbers (just look at the success of the high paying keywords page for an example of that) – poll results and the following analysis of these results will make for an interesting article.
How to Setup Your Own Poll
I am using the WordPress plug-in WP-Polls 2.1 (beta), written by Lester Chan, which has an excellent AJAX style voting system and great backend configuration menus. It was very easy to install (just follow the instructions and you should be okay), however I did do a few modifications myself to the PHP but this was custom to CyberWyre requirements.
When you have added a poll to your blog, take note that while a poll can help to increase user interactivity on your site, it can also demonstrate to your readers how inactive it truly is. A low number of user submissions may give the (possibly false) message that your site is not well trafficked and discourage repeat visitors. Keep an eye on your poll and ensure that it is being used – make sure to place it in an easily visible location on your site and bring attention to it with a post to your blog, encouraging readers to vote.
Check it out for yourself and add a poll to your own blog.
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