Viral Ad Network

I’m pleased to announce our newest round of updates to the Viral Ad Network:

Ad Targeting

After the success of our previous updates to our ad targeting,  we’re now analysing an extra layer of data in the same manner to target ads better, and increase click-through rates.

Ads targeting specific countries or niches will now be compared with the performance of other ads in those specific target audiences, helping to make the most out of every viewer our publishers get.

Publisher Dashboards

By default, your dashboards will now show you your total earnings in the past 14 days. This makes it easier to glance at your dashboard and immediately estimate your current daily earnings from your site.

To show all earnings since your last payment (the previous setting)  simply select “Since Last Payment” in the Date Range dropdown.

Publisher Offers

We’ve streamlined our system for offering specific ads to publishers. This means that in some situations you may now start to receive automated emails letting you know when there is a new offer – and letting you know when the offer ends.

In addition – some publishers will now be given the option of running offers alongside other ads, all without having to modify the embed code on your site. This means that you can make the most of the efficiency of our automated targeting system while running offers outside of our standard syndicated units.

Tim Wintle

Choosing which ads to show can be difficult if there are multiple offers on the table – and it’s easy to get blinded by the price per action (the most obviously financial number that’s normally available).

Our syndicated ad auction uses advertisers’ targeting preferences to increase the expected publisher income directly – a technique that doesn’t involve increased costs per action.

A simple example

You have the option to put one of two different ads up on your site. You can either put up our syndicated unit, which will try to choose the best ads available to show to a user. From looking at your account, you know that you’ve been paid an average of 3.3 pence per viewer.

You have another offer as well – as an advertiser has offered you 5 pence per action to show their ad – which is targeting viewers in the UK.

Which ad should you put up? At a quick glance it might seem obvious that you want to put up the 5 pence offer – but remember that the 5 pence offer is only targeting viewers in the UK. Looking at the country information in your viraladnetwork.net dashboard, you can see that you get a third of your users from the UK, a third from Germany, and a third from France.

So which should you choose? Let’s have a look:

Placing the “5 pence” UK only offer:

Let’s look at the profit you’ll make from three viewers coming – one from France, one from Germany, and one from the UK.

You’ll get paid 5 pence for the UK viewer, but nothing for the other two.

As you can see – the total income you get from these three viewers will be 5 pence. That’s an average of about 1.7 pence per action, or 5 pence per paid action (be sure you know which one the advertiser is reporting – if the advertiser’s offer has been made through the Viral Ad Network, you can see the total number of actions (including non-paid) on your main dashboard page, and you can see the total number of paid actions on the “offers” page).

Placing a syndicated unit:

Let’s look at the profit you’ll make from the same three viewers coming when you have a syndicated unit up…

This time you’re paid for all three viewers (if you want to estimate how much you are paid for visitors on a per-country basis based on previous numbers, you can check on your Viral Ad Network dashboard).

As you can see – the total income you get from these three viewers will be 10 pence – twice as much as for the “5 pence” offer. That’s an average of 3.3 pence per action (price per action is now the same as price per paid action).

How can I estimate this for myself?

It’s worth considering these kind of calculations when you place any content on your site – and recent geo-location information is readily available for you to view on your dashboard once you’ve placed any of our content. The average prices paid will vary with demand though – so keep an eye on your most recent numbers to see what’s on offer.

Of course, we target on much more than the country users come from – and we’re constantly improving our targeting systems – so it’s also worth considering the average clickthrough rate as well – but I’ll save that for another time.

As those of you hosting syndicated Fun Units will know, your units now have their very own geo-targeting mechanism implemented to ensure that our content is shown to the right audience, and to display relevant fun stuff to the visitors of your site.

We realised that this was never announced as loudly as it should have been. Hopefully this should clarify things in enough detail and act as a reference point for you guys until it’s articulated better on the main site:

Geo-targeting allows us to continue to pay you for every view that comes to your site and clicks on our viral content. For example, if somebody from an Italian IP address visits your page, your Fun Unit will automatically display the most relevant content that we are serving for Italian users.

Many advertisers only want to pay for viewers from specific countries. By showing different ads to different users, we are able show each user the ads that will pay you the most. If we have nothing targeted at that specific country, we will show the next highest ad that is available world-wide. This ensures that you receive a payment for every click delivered through your Fun Unit, that the amount you get paid is optimised, and that your inventory isn’t going to waste.

Ker-ching!

Our main targets, based on advertiser trends from the last few months, are the UK, France, Italy, Germany and Spain. This is where we are highly likely to be serving ads at any time, so publishers with significant traffic in any of these territories will currently benefit the most from hosting a Fun Unit. But rest assured, we’re constantly looking to expand these territories and provide those of you with valuable traffic elsewhere with a unit of your own soon!

We will also continue to offer managed placements as they come in for a set time periods and targets – and for a specified price for each territory. The same principles as above will apply, but the content isn’t syndicated and rotated.

Alternatively, if you have an Ad Unit on your site, we often specifically target certain campaigns directly into units. These placements will only be shown to users when our system feels that your site will earn more by showing this site-targetted ad than by showing one that is showing across the rest of the network.

We hope this is clear. Email us at publishers@viraladnetwork.net if you need any more specific details. Also, feel free to post any feedback to us that you may have, we always want to know what we can do better, and look into giving you the things that are going to make your life easier.

Cheers,

The Viral Ad Network team.

We are currently working on a range of new features to our reporting systems – both for publishers and advertisers.

We plan to make the changes live in the middle of next week (between the 28th and 30th of January), and you may find that your dashboards are not available for short periods during the update.

Importantly, our syndication and tracking services will continue to run during this period, so as a publisher you will continue to earn during this scheduled update.

Similarly to the way other popular networks work, actions counted by our tracking services are not added to publisher dashboards immediatly, and we will be pausing this feature during mainainance of the dashboards. When we re-start this feature there may be a large amount of data for our servers to process, which may take some time, so do not be worried if your numbers look a little low over this period, once the system has finished analysing every action the dashboards will be back to normal.

Tim Wintle

A very Happy New Year to all our publishers! December was an incredibly hectic month for us as advertisers squeezed out the last remnants of end of year budgets and launched sales driving campaigns for Christmas. In total we were running over 30 campaigns before the start of the New Year!

Of course in 2009 advertisers are going to be more meticulous than ever in assessing the performance of their budgets and efficacy of their campaigns… but this will mean we will be very well placed to attract more advertisers as our medium and content provides exactly those reporting tools and fastidiousness of targeting that advertisers desire. The upswing at the end of 2008 demonstrated just that and we have already been privy to forecasts and projections that suggest our client base will continue to grow throughout 2009.

Which means, of course, that we are on the look-out for more quality publishers. We have found that referrals from our current publishers have worked brilliantly and we would be delighted to know of any sites you would suggest.

Similarly we are finding that our new syndicated content units are performing very well for those publishers who have taken them up, taking time-consuming administrative tasks away and allowing greater flexibility of attractive content. We are always happy to work something bespoke out for your site so do let us know if you want to give them a try!

We’re proud to announce the launch of our new style of publisher content unit.

We’ve been running our first styles of content unit in invitation-only beta for a little while but until now the ads that have been shown have been limited to text or image links to our content.

With the launch of our gadget content units we can now offer you the chance to embed the entertaining, viral content you’ve come to expect from us directly into your site…and get paid for it.  And you get all the simplicity of our syndication system to boot.

What is a Gadget Content Unit?

A gadget unit can display any type of rich-media content securely in your website automatically. This content can include games, videos or any other rich-media.

Here’s an example gadget content unit:

How do I place a Content Unit?

It’s really easy to place a content unit on your page.  We’ll provide you with a custom embed code which you’ll just need to include in the relevant place on your page.  Then, our syndication system does the rest.  Your embed code will look something like the example below (please don’t copy and paste this example, though — we’ll provide you with your own code if you want a gadget ad!):

<mce:script type="text/javascript"><!-- var vaunit_unit_type=0; var vaunit_width=300; var vaunit_height=250; var vaunit_id=32; // --></mce:script><br /> <mce:script type="text/javascript" src="http://syndication1.viraladnetwork.net/getad/?style=frame" mce_src="http://syndication1.viraladnetwork.net/getad/?style=frame" ></mce:script>

It’s Friday again!

We have some great campaigns in the pipeline, coming up before Christmas, so keep an eye out for us offering placements. There will be some funny/unuasual/ridiculous/entertaining content being pumped into the internet stratosphere by the Viral Ad Network and our wonderful publishers in the next few weeks. Exciting stuff!

We also have some other equally exciting developments and additions to the sophistication of our ad serving. This is in Beta stage, and some of you may be running paid tests for us at the moment!

Have great weekends, and don’t forget, your numbers are visible in your dashboard!

Ian

As one of the developers on the Viral Ad Network team, I’m pleased to announce the introduction of our newly re-designed Publisher Dashboards.

We’ve been listening closely to the feedback that you’ve passed on to our team, and in response we have added functionalities and tools that will be useful to you in the future. The biggest request for inclusion in the publisher dashboards was a function that allowed you to log in and to see a breakdown of the numbers you have delivered for each viral campaign.

With this in mind, the first thing you will see when you log in is now an overview of the statistics for your account. In the top right of the page you’ll find a box that will show you (almost) live totals for the number of actions that have been tracked through the network on all “managed placements” (campaign placements you have organised direct with our network team)*.

Clicking on the link “managed placements” will take you to a page where you can get more detailed breakdowns of the actions you have provided.

Please Note that these totals will not accurately reflect actions that took place prior to the launch of the revised dashboard.

In the top half of the page you can see recent actions broken down by day – which is useful if you want to try changing the positioning of your ads to increase your revenue.

In the lower half of the page you can see a breakdown of actions by campaign, which will be especially useful if you have multiple placements running at one time.

The next most requested feature was help on using the dashboard – you can now find a help page by clicking the link marked “help” near the top of the page.

I hope that you will all find the new features useful – the rest of the development team and myself try to keep up to date with any comments passed on, so if you have any queries or requests do mention them next time you’re in contact with the team and they will be taken into consideration.

Tim Wintle

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p.s. You may see some extra features on the dashboards relating to soon-to-be released features (currently in Alpha) – Ian will be contacting individual publishers to take part in testing over the coming weeks.

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* We aim to provide you with accurate measured action counts, however the numbers displayed are estimates and may be revised. Counts are analysed to discount invalid actions.