Viral Ad Network

You probably won’t have noticed, but I’m proud to announce that we shipped a whole range of new features yesterday.

Ad serving:

1. To increase publisher income, Our live auction for ads now takes more information into consideration than ever before to show the ad that it thinks will make you the most money.
2. Your ads should appear to users even faster than before – We’ve managed to reduce the size of all of our gadget ads – which should improve ad click-through.
3. One publisher reported an issue showing our ads on pages that use a lot of other javascript. We’ve updated our ad units to solve that problem.

Ad Competition

Actually booking ads on the viral ad network is still seen by relatively few people, so it’s not something that we normally write blog posts about, but I thought this time should be different.

We’ve spent a lot of time formally analysing bidding strategies for ads on the Viral Ad Network – the main things that came out of it are:

1. The more that bid prices and targeting options are tweaked, the better it is for all involved (not only that ad, but other advertisers, and publishers)
2. There was a significant time-cost to modifying these options (it used to take about 15 seconds to change the bid price for an ad)
3. People waste time if they target places at the wrong price, and have to keep changing settings just to get shown.

Focusing on these things we’ve just shipped the following improvements,

1. We provide recommended prices for offers automatically – to make sure that advertisers get the best views for their money.
2. We provide minimum prices for standard bookings – to make sure that advertisers don’t try to under-pay our publishers (which would just waste their time as they wouldn’t get any views)
3. We’ve updated our interface, so bookings can be easily modified on one page with a single mouse click. It now takes only 2 seconds to change a bid price.
4. Several more tweaks to make the interface more usable

So, there have been a lot of changes in the last couple of days. Hopefully you’ll find they work well for you, even if they’re not immediately visible.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 11th, 2010 at 1:40 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.