Making money using AdToll - Best Blogs Asia

Making money using AdToll

Dec 30th, 2009 Affiliate Programs 4 Comment

A couple of months ago I reviewed AdToll, a popular Ad network for both publishers and advertisers. I thought I’d put my “money where my mouth is” and show you a working example of how to use Adtoll to full effect and to get clicks.

Using Adtoll

I want to use their advertising on some of my pages/sites, measuring the results with Google Analytics and Statpress and also showcase the revenues earnt. I’ll be promoting:

• Cars Under 1000 Dollars
• Godaddy Asia Domains

Here’s a graph showing the impact of implementing AdToll on my Best Blogs Site, the red mark shows when I first started using them.

However, I think I should first explain the usage of AdToll for both publishers and advertisers.

For Publishers

Bloggers can use AdToll to make money by publishing 2 types of Ads, earning rates are a 75% share :

• Sponsored ads – Set a price you define
• Run of Network ads – Set cost

For Advertisers

From what I gather publishers get free advertising on the AdToll homepage depending on the advertising site’s sales and pricing, clicks can be found for $0.01 CPC! Below is a screenshot of the Buy a Sponsored advert directory, where you can sort by Alexa Rank, Ad Costs, Average Views/Clicks, Average CPC and Rebooking rates.

Site Directory

In general the most popular publishers are in the Entertainment & Games section, which could really mean anything! Internet and Technology and Adult are other popular sections in the directory. I chose these options: Non Adult, Language: English. Then I experimented with America and Asia locations. I find these options very useful and by clicking on each publisher I could see the useful information about their demographic users, average clicks and duration.

Making Money

I limited myself to a small budget and I first had to find the right publisher who offered a good CPC.

I was looking for a short duration time as I wanted instant results, of course this could effect the number of clicks and not give a fair representation of the service but this review is only an example…Signing up as an advertiser was quick and I was also pleasantly surprised to see the stats updating in real-time too.

Run of Network Advert Test

For the carsunder1000dollars.org site, I couldn’t find a relevant high number of clicks ” Sponsored Ad” publisher in the directory so I bought a “Run of Network” general ad, limiting my location to North America:

242clicks @ 8.25cents/click / $20 ad placed
Target Region: North America
Target Categories: Automotive, Culture & Lifestyle, Shopping & Travel

I chose a PicText Ad (without an image), as I wanted to place a text only advert and “stripe ad” would be one long strip of text.

The headline and body text was:
Cheap Cars under $1000
Search Here For Resources On cheap cars under $1000

I could of chose to advertise in all categories, if I had a bigger budget I would of done so. But the categories I chose were Culture & Lifestyle and Shopping & Travel and Automotive. Although I felt I wouldn’t get many clicks from Automotive which the relevant sites in the Directory didn’t get many clicks.

I was then told my request would be personally checked by my ad manager and would approve my Run of Network ad within 24 hours, which it then was within this time frame. I was getting page impressions, but no clucks which could be due to the restrictions on Target Region and my ad copy.

Adtoll kindly refunded my $20 advert, no money earnt.

PicText Advert Test

Learning from the Cars advert, I wanted to continue with a text advert having had experience of these types of ads via Adbrite. For this link, I wanted to aim it at the Asian market since I’m writing about .asia domain names. I found that the directory does have a restriction and can show Asia based publishers, but doesn’t have a feature for Asia based clicks unless I check each publisher individually.

The headline and body text was:
$14.99 .Asia Domains
Register domains cheap. Find Your Technology Needs Here.

865.00 clicks @ 2.31 cents/click / $20 ad placed
Target Region: All Locations
Target Categories: Internet

I know Adtoll is more than just Text Ads, so I will next take advantage of graphic ads.

Earnt $40.

Graphic Banner Advert Test

I then made a 468×60 banner for the same destination above, I wanted more clicks so I sexed it up by adding bright colours and a busty asian babe, although the ad was tasteful. I bought the ad on an individual publisher site this time.

174.83 clicks per day / $19.60 ad placed

Earnt $45 (but total not defined yet).

Sign up with Adtoll

You can join AdToll here. (Referral Program)

Conclusion

One thing I noticed is that it’s great to find groupings of ad publishers, but the actual sites need to be double checked as for example I found Photography websites in the Automotive section of the site. Also when I checked out a publisher’s site, I saw that the Adtoll advert wasn’t in the location specified or even on the promoting site itself. This is a problem and can be hard to enforce on the Network’s side, so to note if you’re buying an advert on a site check out the site’s source code and make sure it excepts ads from that particular network.

I budgetted myself $100 dollars, but ended up spending only $40 having some funds refunded due to lack of clicks.

Note that I was restricted to a low budget and also a short time scale, I would of liked to continue this further. I found it better than Adbrite as Adtoll have advanced targetting groups. Of course buying ads is about being in the right place at the right time, also depends on budget, time of the year and even the economic situation. I found the Adtoll experience to be positive and will be using them again soon.

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