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?

Earlier in the week the WidgetBucks launched (read our first impression review here) with a fair bit of fanfare around the blogosphere.

Since it was announced I’ve had a number of readers ask me why they are not seeing any income in their reports despite there being clicks on the ads (it is a pay per click ad system). I shot WidgetBucks an email on this and the response was as I’d expected – they have an auditing process in place that means there is a 48-72 hour delay in seeing the actual income figure reported.

Why does it take so long? – The reason given is that it takes time to get reports back from their advertisers .

This is the same problem that most similar advertising programs have in one way or another. Chitika only updates all figures once every 24 hours and then audits them at the end of a month (reducing the earnings), AuctionAds have a delayed system too (where you see clicks on ads immediately but it can be days to see what you’ve earned on a given day as a result of it being based upon Auctions that happen over time).

As a blogger I find this frustrating. We’ve become used to systems like AdSense which show us not only impressions and clicks very quickly after they happen – but also the income earned. Of course AdSense is run by Google who have some serious resources to throw at the problem.

As someone who has talked with a lot of these advertising networks personally I also understand the challenge that they have. They need to balance the needs with publishers and the relationships that they have with advertisers (and the systems that the advertisers need to work with). After all – if the advertisers don’t get looked after then the whole system falls down.

I’m not sure what the solution is – but hopefully WidgetBucks can shorten the waiting time in conjunction with their advertising partners – or develop a predictive system that gives publishers an indication of how much they’ve earned to speed up the process. Otherwise I suspect that some publishers will become frustrated with it and give up.

How is WidgetBucks Performing?

I’ve been testing WidgetBucks on one of my blogs and while I’m yet to see any earnings reports I’m pleased to see that their CTR is very similar than other ads in the same position. I’ve rotated it through a split test with Chitika and AdSense in the same position and see both Chitika and WidgetBucks outperforming AdSense on a CTR basis in that position. The real test will be to compare earnings figures. I suspect these results will vary considerably from blog to blog and even based upon ad positioning.