Backup ads to Adsense

[csdude55]

We started to talk about this in the Ad Balancer thread, but I thought maybe it deserved it's own topic so we wouldn't take that one off topic.

What are you guys using as a backup to Adsense? I was just plugging in a home-rolled script that showed local content, but someone suggested Content.ad (Evan Salamanca).

Today was my first day using it; it was approved at around 11am, so it was slightly more than half a day. I set the Ad Balancer to 100% Revenue / 64% Potential (so 36% of my ads that had no value on Adsense were being sent to my backup). I figure that, if I made $0.01 then it's more than I was making on those ads before, so why not! LOL

I was actually pretty impressed; for the half-day, my eCPM was $0.53. That's nowhere close to what I made with the higher ads with Adsense, of course, but as compared to the $0.00 that I WAS making on these ads, that's pretty good!

Of course, this could just be attention on the new ads that will pass. And, since it skipped the morning half of the day it's possible that the average was skewed. So I'm going to give it a week or so, and if the CPM stays good than I'm going to try to pass more Adsense ads to it until I find a bit of a balance. There's no need to take an ad on Adsense that pays, say, $0.30 CPM if I could get $0.40-0.50 with Content.ad, right?

What are you guys using for a backup? Any positive or negative experiences?

[Evan Salamanca]

Prior to using content.ad everything sucked. Most ad networks (media.net, FBAN, Monumetric, etc) somehow didn't work correctly and Sekindo and adsoptimal and others were too low to bother with so I ignored them and left blank spaces which caused an increase in CTR of lower-page Adsense units (when they showed up) and link units. Content.ad as a backup has dropped Adsense revenue and CTR by a small amount but content.ad itself is returning over $1.50 for every 1 thousand page views making it far superior to other options I've tried. Shout out to anefarious for suggesting it before I did.

[anefarious1]

Your welcome. Do you happen to know what percentage of your $1.50/1,000 pageviews is desktop?

[csdude55]

I just looked at mine. This is for roughly 3 days, used as a backup to Adsense:

Impressions:
Desktop: 70,225
Mobile: 65,679
Tablet: 19,271

CTR:
Desktop: 1.5%
Mobile: 0.17%
Tablet: 0.36%

Desktop has a CPM of $1.49, but mobile and tablet are both < $0.10. So for me, still, mobile is virtually worthless.

In regards to the other networks, the only one I've tried is Media.net, but it was terrible. I only used it for 1 week last year, and I had an average RPM of $0.06.

[Evan Salamanca]

Most of the content.ad clicks have been desktop for me. Which explains the CPC. They have also mostly been above the fold.

[Dimitri]

When it comes to backup ads, keep in mind that they will show within an iframe, so don't try to use "contextual" ad networks, since the ads will be added to an "empty" page, with no content

Now, all depends of the nature of your site. Personally I use affiliates links from eBay, and Commission Junction, as backup ads.

[anefarious1]

I would prefer to serve an Amazon affiliate link for my backup ads but that would only make sense for US traffic. But I would assume a good portion of backups are served to persons outside the United States. Since Content.Ad has a near 100% fill rate (although I'm sure some clicks pay ZERO) it would seem to be the best option. I'd like to find a more suitable alternative though. It's a good discussion due to the new Ad balance feature.

[Dimitri]

With the eBay program, you are cover 12 areas (USA, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, UK, Nederlands ). Showing items related to your content, can be a good idea (if your content can be matched with ebay's items of course). (and eBay links are not blocked by ad blockers).

With Commission Junction, this is convenient to be able to join plenty of a program, from all kind of countries, on one place, with one check.

[Dimitri]

Additionally, self promotion can be a good alternative. This is not earning money "directly", but it can contribute to bring visitors to other part of your site(s) which can generate incomes.

[IanCP]

@ anefarious1

I would prefer to serve an Amazon affiliate link for my backup ads

Which is precisely what I did. Display a clickable 728X90 jpg file.which leads to a specific page on my site with product links - all directly relevant to my site's content.

I don't know if it works as there doesn't seem to be an effective way to test it - so far the specific tracking ID hasn't shown up in my Amazon reports.

I've been with Amazon since 1998 - that was back in the days when Jeff Bezos himself sent you a welcome email.

[Dimitri]

>> that was back in the days when Jeff Bezos himself sent you a welcome email.<<

Cool :-D , I hope you still have this email, it's collector :D

[anefarious1]

@ IaCP: If the unique tracking ID isn't showing up in your Amazon reports - that is certainly not a good sign.

@ Dimitri: I should give eBay a try although I feel like they have been losing ground to Amazon over the years. I also believe there has been somewhat of a mass exodus from their affiliate program for various reasons.

[csdude55]

@ Dimitri: I should give eBay a try although I feel like they have been losing ground to Amazon over the years. I also believe there has been somewhat of a mass exodus from their affiliate program for various reasons.

I signed up for it myself today, but I honestly can't make heads or tails out of their program. They have a system to create a banner, but it doesn't give me the code. There's a section of "Daily Deals", but no way to implement it. And the RSS feed requires a keyword search to build the feed, so I can't figure out how to use that to build my own "Daily Deals" section.

It'd be nice if I could manually plug a keyword in to the XML feed, and then just pull up results from that. This way, I could grab keywords from the page dynamically instead of having to build it manually.

After about 30 minutes of trying to figure it out, I just gave up. Which is too bad, it'd be nice to have something new to show people with ad blockers.

[csdude55]

I don't think I should create a new topic on this, but I hope somebody can help me math this out.

If Adsense has an average RPM of, say, $1.50, and the backup has an average RPM of, say, $0.60, where would one place his Ad Balancer to maximize his value on both?

I'm using made-up (but not TOO made-up) numbers for the example, so please show your work so we can apply it to every situation :-)

I'm thinking that it should be set at 60% of Revenue:

// Backup is worth 40% of original
0.60 / 1.50 = 0.4
0.4 * 100 = 40%

// Which means that 60% of original is worth more than backup
100% - 40% = 60%

[IanCP]

@ IanCP: If the unique tracking ID isn't showing up in your Amazon reports - that is certainly not a good sign.

Only if you "assume" back up ads are normally being triggered - which may not be the case in my particular situation. It is entirely feasible my sites are never without Ads.

No way to test or check that I know of.

[csdude55]

Oh, well, don't get too excited about Content.ad, guys. I've been running it as a backup for 5 days, and just got the following email.

The Content.ad Compliance Team has reported poor quality associated to the clicks from [Example]. Over the past week, we have seen very low conversion rates and/or high bounce rates once your site's traffic visits our advertiser pages.

To protect our advertisers, we've set [Example] to run on a performance basis. This means you will only make money when conversions take place on our advertiser's sites. This may have a significant negative impact on your current eCPM, but you will still have the opportunity to generate revenue and should see increased revenue as your quality improves.

To improve the quality of your traffic, we advise the following:
• Target the widget to receive U.S., Canadian, and Australian traffic only
• Restrict showing our widget to visitors from low quality traffic sources
• Test new traffic sources against your current ad mix
• Remove widgets that may produce a high amount of unqualified clicks or "click spam"

Let us know once you're able to make adjustments, and we will be happy to review your site again for promotion.

My traffic is > 99.5% in the US, and most of the ads I've seen from them are promoting articles, not e-commerce. So I guess they don't like getting Google's rejects, after all.

It was good while it lasted, I guess, but if I wanted a conversion-based ad network then I'd just sign up for a bunch of affiliate programs and have more control over it.

[anefarious1]

@ csdude55 That was exactly my impression of the eBay program. Spot on. I can't make any sense of it. Lots of bells and whistles but nothing appealing or easy to implement.

[Dimitri]

At eBay, you can generate manually one RSS feed, then, just look at the URL created, you'll find your keywords , then you can simply replace them with whatever you want to automatically generate RSS Feeds.

Yes, nothing is "easy to implement" , easy money with Internet site was back to the early 2000's. Back to that time, I was earning $15.000 / mo barely doing nothing :-D, ... but times have changed a LOT since that time. Hopefully, I saved this money.

[csdude55]

Just to further the issue with Content.ad, today they deducted my earned value by several hundred dollars, claiming that there were "serious quality issues". Which is total BS; over 99% of my traffic is local (from within the US).

Yesterday, the RPM was $0.25. Today, $0 after 41 clicks. And where the Earnings report did show around $300, today it shows $0.

So I'm going to have to consider Content.ad to be a bit close to the fraudulent side. Or at least over-sold and over-hyped. I sent them a lot of traffic, earned a lot of money, and for reasons unknown they're refusing to pay up.

[Dimitri]

Sorry for you @csdude55, that's why I go only with big names , Adsense, eBay, Amazon, Commission Junction and media.net (which is not a big name, but I gave it a try, they paid on time, no deduction, very friendly but very poor performances).

[csdude55]

Yep, excellent point, Dimitri. I knew better than to get excited, but I was already paying some bills in my mind with that extra (fake) money :'-(

I mentioned before that I had almost $0 results from Media.net when I tried them several years ago. They just sold out last year to a company in China, though, so it could get better... or worse:

[media.net...]

I think I'll try to figure out the Amazon thing again; I tried it awhile back but got confused and dropped it. So far, my only consistently positive result, aside from Adsense, has been with Coupons.com. You have to have a fair amount of traffic to get approved, but I set up a page for their widget on my site, then use their RSS feed to create static 300x250 blocks that I can show to ad blockers and as a backup to Adsense. It doesn't make a LOT of money (maybe $30 /month), but at least it's been consistent and they actually pay.

[ChanandlerBong]

Content.ad has been a disaster for us. Half the clicks not even paying! How on earth do they think they're getting away with that? Code coming off my site immediately.

Our problem is that our ad balancer is set to 55%/99% but our stats show that pretty much all of that extra 45% is in non-Europe/N.America. We have a global site so we do have a lot of traffic in less wealthy parts of the world, but it's not paying. Think we are going to rethink things and go more towards self promotion. I would rather do that than earn a dollar a day filling our site with ways to beat belly fat and asking our users if they believe number 7 on this list of badly timed wedding photos (I couldn't believe it...it was INCREDIBLE!1!)

[ChanandlerBong]

@IanCP One good way of testing your adsense backup ads is with Tor browser. You can alter a config file to give you IPs only from certain countries. For some reason, Ukraine works well - i.e. both fast (for us in Europe) and often serving up AS backup ads. This is something google should offer off the bat, would be very simple to offer a "backup_ad" URL parameter or something, but they do the absolute minimum when it comes to utilising backups so no surprise there.

[IanCP]

Interesting. Following simple setup. No alteration to config files. Enter URL of my main site produces this extraordinary response.

Error 403: Forbidden

You don't have permissions to access this page. This usually means one of the following:

this file and directory permissions make them unavailable from the Internet.
.htaccess contains instructions that prevent public access to this file or directory.

Please check file and directory permissions and .htaccess configuration if you are able to do this. Otherwise, request your webmaster to grant you access.

Of course the same URL in Firefox 47 brings up the regular site.

[ChanandlerBong]

do you know if your host blocks certain proxies/IPs at server level? Might be worth asking them why you get a 403 when using Tor. I have seen it before though.

[IanCP]

I was able to use it on a minor old site. Set config file to Ukraine...

I see AdSense 729 X 90 ad relevant to page content.

[Evan Salamanca]

Can't speak for the deductions but the content.ad clicks likely aren't paying because they switched your account to entirely CPA ads. I got switched up like this by them one time and was able to sweet-talk my account rep into adding CPC ads back in.

At any rate, my CPC is down to about 6 cents with them lately. They've never missed a payment since I started using them in about 2014 (maybe 2013) so I'm not worried on that front.

[csdude55]

I assume that's what they meant by "performance basis", so yeah, you're right. The thing is, all of the ads they were showing were for articles, so how, exactly, does anyone "act" on that? The whole model was nonsense.

I talked to my rep last week and she said that she was going to speak to the traffic quality team. But as of today, I haven't heard anything more.

I think it's important, though, that since I started this thread and was endorsing them at what appeared to be around $0.60 CPM, others should know that it could turn in to $0 with virtually no warning. So until something changes, I'm retracting my endorsement entirely.

[thedonald123]

Something to keep in mind.
Google Adsense, the biggest ad network on the planet, the only ad network that serves ads to visitors from every single country, has basically told you this visitor is worthless i.e. we have no paying ads to show to this visitor. (What they were showing before Ad Slider is an unsettling question)
Why would any other ad network pay to show add to visitors that even Adsense can't fill or doesn't want? Maybe these are bots, users using ad block, users with JS turned off or users with no cookies who can't be retargeted.

[csdude55]

IMHO, it would be the ad network's job to figure that out, not mine. Punishing a publisher for the ad networks inability to properly filter is a bad business model.

If that were the issue, though, one would hope that discussion would have been involved. In my case, I was sending them the bottom 27% of my traffic, but was planning to increase that to roughly 50%. But they cut me off without any discussion, so they lost a little over 6 million monthly ad impressions.