WidgetBucks have announced that they will begin to serve CPM based ads to traffic that isn’t from the US or Canada (starting early in December).

This comes in the wake of them previously stopping international traffic from seeing their ads – something that caused many publishers to stop using them. The announcement on their blog doesn’t mention what the CPM rate will be or what type of ads will be served.

They do say that the ads will not be adult or have ‘other suggestive themes’ and that they are country specific ads. My concern is that the quality and relevancy of an ad can have an impact upon the blog that it appears on. For example if you’re running a fashion blog and the alternate ad is one of those annoying smiley face ads then it’s going to be a turn off for readers.

It’s a step in the right direction – but I’d prefer a little more control over what ads appear on my blogs and would want to know the CPM range before I’d reinstall WidgetBucks on those blogs that I removed it from due to large proportions of non North American traffic.

My personal preference would be for them to set up a system like AdSense that would allow publishers to run their own ads as alternate ads.

Over the last couple of months there’s been a lot written about new ad network – WidgetBucks. As with any new player in this market there has a lot of varied opinions shared about them with some publishers reporting quite amazing conversion and others finding the system frustrating as the team at WidgetBucks hones their system into one that works both for publishers and advertisers.

In this interview with Matt Hulett (CEO of WidgetBucks – note: I previously had this as being an interview with Dean Jutilla – but didn’t realize that it was Matt who had actually written the answers – aaah email intervews) I ask him about the journey so far, get him to give us some tips on how to make more money with WidgetBucks and we get a glimpse at the future for this emerging ad network.

Also in this interview Matt announces a significant change to WidgetBucks which is going to significantly alter the performance of the network for some publishers – particularly those with non US traffic. I’ve included my opinions on this change at the bottom of this interview.

There are a real array of ad network options available to bloggers these days – why should bloggers consider WidgetBucks?

In a very short time, we seem to have struck a chord with bloggers who have been looking for both money-making widgets and a better, more lucrative option compared to traditional ad networks. WidgetBucks offers both to publishers, bloggers and affiliates who want to make money online.

I’m not sure if people recognize this but ours is the only ad network that uses eBay as a barometer of popularity within our widget. We also show best prices on products from at branded merchants. So your site visitors not only see what’s hot and popular based trends of over 100 million online shoppers, they also are offered the lowest prices on those products.

We’ve also showed we do listen to suggestions from our publishers — everything from real-time reporting to monthly account summaries to more widget categories and more.

Who is behind WidgetBucks? What did you do before this venture?

WidgetBucks was created by Mpire.com , the online meta-shopping service that brings together all the most popular online marketplaces such as eBay, Amazon, Shopping.com, Wal-Mart, Target, Gap, and thousands more — into one single site. We blend all that historical pricing information with our pricing analytics and other proprietary technologies to create what we like to call the “Kelly Blue Book” for online products. We are able to tell people what they can expect to pay for that product they are interested in — and then help them take the next step in buying it. Mpire has been around since 2005 — and after originally focusing on offering eBay selling tools, we turned buyer-focused just over a year ago. Today, Mpire.com is getting between 800,000 – 900,000 unique visitors a month. So WidgetBucks fits into our strategy of distributing our pricing analytics across the Web, almost like thousands of little mini-Mpire’s being hosted on publishers’ sites.

We’ve seen a lot of people calling WidgetBucks a scam and really questioning our legitimacy. Naturally, new services draw suspicion, so it’s not terribly surprising.

What I’m hoping comes across here is that we are a real company, backed by real investors, and around me is a talented and dedicated team. I suppose mob mentality and grabbing pitch forks makes for a better, more clickable headline than learning the facts sometimes. But people should know that Mpire and WidgetBucks are both legit, and publishers who have followed our terms of service (which I guess means they’ve actually read them) will get paid — in fact, likely to be paid sooner than our 45-day term.

Publishers are talking about a drop in RPC. What’s the latest on that?

Right now, the team’s sole focus is improving network quality and maintaining our competitive RPC, which we have seen drop over the last 4-5 days. We are taking steps to get the RPC recover, and should see an impact on that over the next seven days.

What I mean by improving network quality is raising the lead “value” for merchants, who will be willing to pay a strong RPC. The key factor is non-converting clicks from outside of U.S. and Canada, because the reality is that this traffic is dragging down RPC across the board. International users who click-through to a U.S. merchant’s site and highly unlikely to purchase from that merchant for various reasons, such as language barrier or shipping cost.

You mentioned taking steps to help raise the RPC. What are you planning?

Publishers will be seeing two things, primarily. First, merchants are no longer being charged for clicks from outside the U.S. and Canada on WidgetBucks widgets, and as a result, publishers will no longer receive credit for those clicks. While this may seem extreme, it will ultimately have a positive impact on RPC levels. This change does not affect earnings from October (just posted) or the first half of November, by the way.

So the next natural question is, where do these users get sent? International site visitors will be redirected to mpire.com, which was mentioned earlier in the interview and was on TIME magazine’s list of the 50 Best Sites for 2007.

Second, early next week, WidgetBucks will become a “gated” ad network that will require approval to join. For current publishers, this does not change much for you. You are “grandfathered” into the network; however, we will continue to review sites for Terms violations. By raising the bar of entry, we anticipate this will help eliminate a number of issues we’re facing.

Just to clarify – when people are redirected to mpire.com – will they earn anything for that traffic at all?

No. Merchants are not being charged for that traffic, and therefore publishers will not be credited for it. And to be really clear, Mpire/WidgetBucks does not get the credit either. We will likely evaluate re-adding specific countries over time and evaluate their conversions, but we want to take a position over the next few weeks to be very tight on click traffic to restore our RPC numbers.

What are you suggesting that publishers with a lot of non US traffic do?
We suggest implementing a geo-based ad placement service to determine when to display a WidgetBucks ad widget versus an Internationally applicable ad. Some examples include MaxMind, IP2Location, etc, and there are solutions available for OpenAds that do this as well.

What do you wish you did differently in the launch of WidgetBucks?

We may have underestimated how fraudulent accounts and non-converting traffic would impact our RPC levels in certain categories. As a result, starting later this week, we are moving to a “gated” ad network that will require publishers to get approval before they can join WidgetBucks. Should we have done this in the beginning? Perhaps. But we felt the low barrier to entry was important to offer from the beginning.

What types of blogs does WidgetBucks seem to be working on best?

As you’ve mentioned a number of times on Problogger, product-focused blogs are ideal for WidgetBucks. We completely agree. By nature, our categories are geared toward products, so a mom blogging about baby gear or a camera buff reviewing the latest point-and-shoot can use our widgets to enhance their editorial with relevant offers. This is also true when using MerchSense, our contextual algorithm. Some affiliates have complained that MerchSense isn’t returning the right products — and this isn’t surprising for that type of blog. It’s currently set up to snap to product buckets (i.e. product blog), but we’re making improvements to the system to expand the buckets.

Have you got any tips for bloggers wanting to maximize their WidgetBucks earnings? What do the best earners do that the rest could improve upon?

We’re finding there are a few universal practices that can help publishers maximize their earnings. These include:

• placing your widgets above the fold, as well as varying your sizes depending on the content around it.
• also, make sure the ads are relevant to the content, either through MerchSense or by hand-picking the category
• we’ve also heard from publishers that unusual shaped ads, not the standard sized ads, actually convert better because they appear more as content.
• others are integrating a 300 x 250 widget into their relevant content.
• finally, with today’s news of the international traffic credit change, we’d suggest publishers adjust their geographic-coding for U.S. and Canada where WidgetBucks widgets appear.

Do you have any new features planned that you can tell us about?

Be on the look out for new widget creative — it’s currently being tested right now. We’ll also be creating more affinity-oriented creative, meaning a fantasy sports blogger or fashion blogger will have relevant skins to place on their widgets. Be looking for more interactive widgets as well. I know that seems vague but these new versions will let users engage more with the widget itself.

We’ve also already rolled out a few other features that have been lost in the shuffle of October earnings being posted and other buzz:

• Real-time referral tracking. We’ve had a lot of publishers ask for rolled up referral totals so we’re looking to add that. Also, within the referral table, referred accounts are only listed by ID, not by email, unless the referred publisher proactively selects the “Share Referrer Information.” Otherwise, it will default to the ID only.
• Show Deleted Widgets. This let’s publishers look at earnings from inactive widgets.
• Hexcode colors. Publishers now have more control over the color of the WidgetBucks widgets on their site by using a 6-digit hexcode 0-F or go from the color palette.
• Publishers can now determine the interval speed of how products are displayed on their widgets. It’s currently defaulted to three seconds, but can be adjusted between 1-10 seconds.

A Note from Darren

There’s lots of information in this post. My own personal opinion with the changes that were announced in it regarding non US and Canadian traffic – I’m not surprised (other publishers have done this), but it sucks. As a publisher who is running WidgetBucks on a blog which gets 70-80% Australian traffic (a country that I know buys extensively online from around the world) I’m very disappointed that yet again an ad network is changing the rules mid stream.

On a head level I understand the need for balancing the needs of publishers and advertisers and don’t envy the position that they are in – but as a publisher this will hit the hip pocket.

This happened with Chitika also (although they only limited some Asian countries and moved quickly to make partnerships with European advertisers to monetize that traffic better) and was one of the main reasons that publishers revolted against them. YPN have also excluded sites with non US traffic (although at least they did this from the start).

Even publishers with good traffic from the US will be impacted by this. For example I run the ads at DPS, a blog with it’s largest readership in the USA. However US and Canadian traffic only make up just over 65% of my traffic on that blog. So while on my Aussie blogs I’m looking at 80-90% less earnings – on my blog with good US traffic I’m still looking at a 35% cut in earnings.

One thing that confuses me about this is that when someone is redirected to the mpire.com site for not being situated in the US they are being redirected to store where that person can make a purchase – at least with some merchants. For example I just went to Mpire and did a search for the latest Harry Potter book – ended up at Amazon (which will ship that book to me here in Australia). I’m a bit unsure about whether Mpire earns either a commission or a CPC payment for that. I know that I do when I send an Aussie to Amazon and they buy something.

Matt advises above that bloggers geotarget and serve ads only to US traffic. The problem is that most bloggers don’t have the ability or resources to do this type of thing. It’ll be easier just to stop using WB altogether.

Perhaps one solution would be that WidgetBucks allows publishers to suggest an ‘alternate ad’ that they want to appear instead of the WB one when someone is viewing a page from a place outside of North America (in a similar way that AdSense allows ‘alternative ads’ to be shown when they can’t serve an ad.

Until they come up with an alternative I guess those of us with significant non North American traffic will be going back to other options to make money from our blogs. I’ll monitor WidgetBucks performance on my blogs for 24 hours but if the conversion drops by what I’m expected I’ll be switching all my units back to Chitika and AdSense pretty quickly (although with the AdSense changes revealed yesterday it’s not been a good week for publishers). For the slightly higher CPM earnings I was getting with WidgetBucks I’m not sure it’s worth my time to have to invest in geotargeting all my ads.

New advertising network WidgetBucks has just updated publishers accounts with their earnings figures from the previous month of earnings.

This includes three amounts. A $25 signup bonus, the earnings that their Widgets earned for October plus earnings from their referrals (10% of the earnings of those that they referred).

While it’s only been about 6 weeks since WidgetBucks launched I’d be interested to hear the thoughts of those who’ve been trying them now that they’ve got their first month’s totals.

My own feelings have not really changed since I first came across them.

• I think that the system has a lot of potential
• It’s early days and there’s lots of room for improvement from WB to make the service really great
• My own earnings have been very encouraging (WB is outperforming both AdSense and Chitika on a couple of blogs for me – although is doing less on others – I find that product related blogs is where it really shines). I don’t think that I’m allowed to reveal earnings – but lets just say that they are four figures per month – and that I’ve only been using them sparingly so far).
• Interestingly – the amount that I earned from referrals fees over the month of October was considerably less than I’d expected. In fact if that figure is 10% of the amount that those I’ve referred are earning I’m earning more than all of them put together (and I’ve referred hundreds of bloggers). Obviously not everyone who signed up is using WB and not everyone is getting the great results I have so far.
• I have noticed a decrease in click values in the last week or two. I’m presuming that WB are tweaking the back end to get the balance right between publishers and advertisers right. I hope it doesn’t decrease too much further though as it’ll bring it back to a par with other networks for me in terms of profitability
• I’ve noticed some improvements in the loading speed of Widgets. Its still not super fast but a lot better than it was for me

They are my initial reports – I’d be interested to hear what others are finding.

As we mentioned in our scoop yesterday – Feedburner today announced that AdSense can now be integrated with FeedBurner Site Ads.

Get the full details at Feedburner’s blog today.

Breaking news just to hand:

Feedburner seem to have quietly added a feature to publishers in their Feedburner Ad Network that allows them to sync their Feedburner account and AdSense account – at least for their on website content (ie not in your RSS feeds).

Logging into the Monetize area on your Feedburner account (if you’re approved to access it) and you’ll see:

Note – Feedburner Ad Network allows you to run ads both in your feeds and on your page – this option is only for running ads on your page/blog and not in your feeds.

Having said this – hopefully in time the option will come to combine Feedburner RSS ads and AdSense RSS ads (a program that has been in beta for a very long time).

Thanks to Collis for the email heads up on this one.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been testing a new service called PubMatic on one of my blogs and I think it’s something that will interest some ProBlogger readers – particularly those with medium to large blogs wanting to optimize their advertising.

The premise behind PubMatic is that when you’re a publisher you are confronted with an array of advertising networks to choose from to monetize your blog. Many bloggers start with AdSense, but soon find that there are numerous other options to test.

But who has time to test which option will work best for your blog?

The problem we face is that if we don’t test different options we could be leaving money on the table (just imagine that there was another option out there that monetized your blog a lot better than what you’re currently doing) but testing different networks (and testing different options within a network) takes time – a lot of time.

Anyone who has started testing different ad design with just AdSense knows that it takes a lot of tweaking and testing to get the best performing ad – but then if you have to do that with different networks as well you could have yourself a full time job just doing ad optimization!

This is where PubMatic comes in.

Pubmatic is one of numerous new services that has been launched in the last year or so that takes some of the grunt work out of optimizing your ads.

The system is a little difficult to explain (there’s a great video below that will give you a nice rundown) – but in short it has two main features that will interest bloggers:

1. Run an Ad Network Auction – Pubmatic allows you to run a mini Ad Network Auction on your blog for each of your ad units – every time a visitor comes to your page. What this means is that you are able to sign up for multiple ad networks and run them all on an ad unit – serving up the ad that will perform best for you. Ad networks that are supported at this time include AdSense, YPN, ValueClick, Komli, Blue Lithium, Burst Media, Advertising.com, Tribal Fusioin and Casale Media. I’m told that PubMatic are also negotiating with a few other ad networks that will be more familiar to bloggers.

2. Optimize Your Ad Layout – the second part of PubMatic is that they help you to work out what ad layout will work best for you. So at present I’m using PubMatic on one of my blogs on one AdSense ad unit to help me to work out what ad design will work best. Instead of me having to do split testing on the ad unit and to keep trying different color schemes – PubMatic is rotating a variety of different ad unit colors through the ad unit for me and is tracking what works and what doesn’t. Once it completes a ‘training phase’ (more on this below) it will run the best performing ad design in that ad unit for me.

The other cool part of PubMatic is that it provides you with a central place to view all the ad units that you run through them. So instead of having an AdSense account, a YPN account and other accounts to check your reports – IF you choose to run all your ad units through PubMatic you can view them all centrally.

OK – that’s my explanation of it – but let me show you the official PubMatic Tour Video. I’ll also write a few first impressions of it below:

First Impressions of PubMatic

I’m writing this first impression review as someone who is only testing it in a limited way. This is for two reasons:

1. Because I am not enrolled as a publisher in most of the Ad Networks that are available with PubMatic. This is because some are not available outside of the USA (YPN for example) and because some are pretty major networks that have pretty high standards to get into them.

2. Because I’m only testing it on one ad unit so far and am still in the ‘training period’ with that ad unit.

So my first impressions:

I love the concept - this is the future of ad management for publishers. There are other systems doing this – but this is one of the few that I’ve seen that is accessible for smaller publishers and that is currently free (it’s free during it’s current Beta – not sure where it’ll go after that).

More Ad Networks Please – I say this is accessible to publishers of all sizes – but should say that most bloggers will not be able to fully use it (as I am not) because the current ad networks that you can use it with are out of the reach of many. I’m looking forward to the day that other ad networks are added (for example Chitika and WidgetBucks would be great).

Trial Period is Too Long – I’m told that the trial period (the period that it takes for PubMatic to work out which ad design will work best) is currently between 50,000 – 70,000 impressions. This means that if you’re testing an ad unit to see what colors work best for your blog – you’ll see it rotate through different color schemes for quite a long time if you’re an average blogger (considering that 35% of ProBlogger readers have under 100 readers a day on their blogs this could be frustrating).

Trial Period Ads – While PubMatic learns what ad design will work best on your blog you will see some very very very ugly ad units on your blog. Here are a few random ads that I just saw in my test unit:

OK – they are BUTT UGLY ads (considering the blog is largely a Red/Maroon color scheme). But don’t write off PubMatic yet because you don’t need to subject your readers to this. I’ve been testing PubMatic with a ‘I don’t care’ option selected when it comes to what colors are selected. I didn’t realize this – but there’s also another option to ‘blend ads’. I’ve just selected this now and will see how those ads look shortly. (update: the ads are better in ‘blend’ mode – although still not perfectly blended to the site – however I guess this is the point of using this service as it helps to work out what converts best). Perhaps an improvement could be to give publishers an option to nominate some colors that Pubmatic could choose from (ie to select 10-20 ads that would be acceptable to test the different variations).

‘Ads Optimized by PubMatic’ Tag – You can see in the ads above that each one also has a little link back to PubMatic. While I understand why they’ve got this and on one level don’t mind (they are giving the service for free at this time) I’d prefer not to see them. There’s already an ‘Ads by Google’ link on the ads and to see another one just gives readers more options to click something that is not an ad and it does clutter things a little more than is perhaps needed.

Easy to Install and Good Reports – Getting set up with PubMatic was easy. I had my first ad unit working within minutes. The reports are good too. The only downside of the setup is that you don’t start getting reports immediately – they say that they take 2 days (mine took about 24 hours) before you start seeing the results.

Conclusions

My initial conclusions (is it possible to have a conclusion that is initial?) are that this is a service that many medium to larger bloggers will want to experiment with. It’s a beta launch so I’m sure there is a lot more in terms of features to be added – but it’s a service that hopefully will mature in time into a very useful tool for bloggers. I doubt it’ll be something that smaller bloggers will find that useful at this time (although it’s open to them to test) due to the long trial periods and the restrictions on networks included – but in time I suspect that even a smaller publishers will find uses for this type of tool.

PubMatic Challenge

The reason I’m publishing this first impression review today is that today they are launching a new competition called the PubMatic Challenge where they will be picking winners each month to be rewarded with free advertising. All you need to do to be in the running to win is to sign up – run PubMatic and given them feedback on how much it’s helped you to increase your revenues. The winners each month will get some free advertising on a variety of Web 2.0 websites.

WidgetBucks today emailed publishers using their system with a note to let them know that they’ve been working on loading times for WidgetBucks ad units. This has been one of the major complaints of publishers about the system.

The upside is that they’ve found a way to decrease loading times for publishers – the downside is that you need to update the code on your blog for the changes to come into effect (see below for instructions).

The other benefit of the update that they didn’t actually mention in the email is that the new code no longer has a backlink to WidgetBucks in it (something that has been criticized by many). Andy Beard has more on these changes and makes some suggestions on other changes they need to make.

Here’s how they said to make the update:

You will need to update code of your existing widgets for the speedier load times to take affect on your site, blog or network. Know that changing the code will not impact earnings for any of your widgets.

Here are the two steps you’ll need to follow:

1. Sign-in to http://widgetbucks.com and go to My Widgets

2. For each active widget, simply edit and re-copy the code block into your site or blog (the same steps you went through when you created the widgets originally)

Update to WidgetBucks Policies Regarding Non English Sites

Also announced today by WidgetBucks is that they’ve updated their Policies to exclude Non English sites in their program.

They explain:

“As we’ve continued to evaluate impression, click and conversion data during WidgetBucks’ first 3+ weeks, we’ve observed that a majority of non-English language sites are delivering a consistently low conversion rate. With our merchants and advertisers predominantly based in the U.S., this is not a surprising phenomenon. And as an advertising network, we have a responsibility to our merchants to deliver quality traffic that has the highest likelihood of conversion to sale.”

This is going to hurt for non english sites and already I’ve heard complaints – understandably so. Some have complained that they’ve seen good conversions on their non english sites. My response would be that by ‘conversion’ I suspect WidgetBucks is not talking about the ads getting clicked – but about the ads converting for advertisers. I suspect that the reason for this change is that advertisers complained that they were paying out for traffic that didn’t actually buy from them.

It’s a pity that WidgetBucks didn’t foresee this problem and learn from the pain of other ad networks who had the same issue.

PS: I’d be interested to hear whether others are noticing faster loading times. My initial feelings are that it’s marginally faster – but still slower than I’d like. I wondered whether it’s my location impacting speed and have put in an email to WidgetBucks to see.

It has been a bit over two weeks since the new advertising network WidgetBucks announced it’s launch (here’s where I posted my first impression review of WidgetBucks) and as promised here is my update on how it has been performing for me.

For those of you unfamiliar with WidgetBucks – here’s a sample ad unit to remind you.

I’ve been testing it in a couple of places and to this point have found it to have had mixed success. A few comments:

The Good Stuff about WidgetBucks

• All of the testing that I’ve been doing with WidgetBucks ad units have been on product related blogs where I think they have a much greater chance of performing well than on blog with other topics.
• I’ve been running it in a ‘split test’ with Chitika ads in one position (ie 50% of the time I display a Chitika ad unit and 50% a WidgetBucks unit) and to this point the WidgetBucks ad is earning more on a CPM basis than the Chitika unit (it’s still early days on that test though). The CTR is higher on the WidgetBucks ad but the click value is higher on the Chitika ads.
• I’ve also done split tests with AdSense and found that WidgetBucks out performed them also.
• As a result of all this – I’m earning more with WidgetBucks than I would have with ads in the same positions as with either Chitika and AdSense (and considering that they are my two biggest earners that’s pretty good).
• I suspect CTR is higher because of the animation in the ads which draws the eye to them.
• WidgetBucks have been adding new ad unit sizes and categories. They’ve also announced that they’ll be adding more options in the weeks ahead.
• Reporting is good (although having the delay/auditing does make it difficult to test and tweak ads)

The Bad Stuff about WidgetBucks

• Despite WidgetBucks staff commenting that their ads load fast – I still see them loading slowly on my blogs. They are generally the last thing to load on my pages (which is good in that they let other things load first) but it can take 1-3 seconds for them to load (some report it as being longer). This isn’t really good enough.
• Contextual Targeting doesn’t seem to have worked for me very well. I tested an ad unit in the contextual mode on my blog and it gave reasonable results in that the ads were on cameras and the site was about cameras – but I’ve rarely seen more specific targeting. What I mean by this is that if I have a page about a particular model of camera I’ve never seen a WidgetBucks ad actually served that mentions that camera. I think if they were more targeted contextually the CTR would be significantly higher – the ads would probably convert better for advertisers too.
• Ads dominate pages too much for my liking. While they do give the option to use different color schemes, even the most subtle colors make it difficult to blend ads into a page. While this probably helps with CTR it isn’t great for usability – particularly with all the animation going on. While you can easily have 2-3 ad units of AdSense or Chitika on a page to run too many WidgetBucks ads on a page would probably be quite overwhelming for readers.
• In my first impression review I said that the affiliate program sucked – they improved it which is great – however they don’t give any indication of what those earnings are until the first week of the following month. It’d be great to have some more immediate indications of not only the total number of referrals but how it’s performing. This would also give me a clearer indication whether others are earning good money from WidgetBucks.

So on an earnings from I like WidgetBucks – but on a design and reader usability front I still have some issues which hold me back from using them more.

Again – it’s worth emphasizing that different ad options will work differently on different blogs. WidgetBucks ads work well for me on product related blogs (as do Chitika) – while AdSense seems to work better for me on non product related blogs. The key is to test test test and see what works best for you.

I should also say that it’s another couple of weeks until payments come through from WidgetBucks. I don’t have any doubt that they’ll pay as promised – but while the initial earnings from it look pretty decent I can’t really review it fully until I see some cash hit my paypal account!

What’s Your WidgetBucks Review?

Have you tried WidgetBucks yet? If not click here to sign up. If so – what do you think now that you’ve had a couple of weeks to test them?