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.