Tags: I came across a blog post by Bob Buskirk where he discusses his experience using Openads to manage his advertising on ThinkComputers.
"[Openads] is a really powerful program that allows you to input ads into the system [...] for each ad spot on my page I can have many ads rotating and enable and disable certain ads. The system also tracks impressions and clicks so if I have private advertising they can see how their ads are performing."
Bob mentions that he’s trying out different ad networks to improve the revenue he makes from online advertising, in particular he’s trialling AuctionAds.
AuctionAds is relatively new, in fact it’s only just 3 months old, but it already seems to be a real hit for some websites. So what is AuctionAds?
When AuctionAds launched in March, ProBlogger published an insightful review.
“AuctionAds display live eBay auctions to visitors to your blog which are based upon your keyword selection. The payment is CPA (ie you get paid if a reader registers on eBay or if they make a purchase). AuctionAds uses eBay’s built in affiliate program - you could actually run these ads yourself as an affiliate - but Auction Ads cuts down the work involved considerably”
More recently, the ProBlogger readers gave their opinion (en masse!). There are some remarkable success stories but it is clear that success depends heavily on the nature of your website and readership. Product focused websites appear to be the big winner, for example this is one of the reader review comments:
“AuctionAds has been working AWESOME for us. We have a great golf oriented website and just no way to monetize it. AuctionAds was a true blessing in disguise! For April we made over 25,000.00″ - Blue
Andy Beard also blogged his thoughts on AuctionAds, his conclusion…
"I strongly encourage you to take a look at AuctionAds for yourself. If you are an international affiliate, it is in my opinion the best option for the Ebay affiliate program, other than features such as PPC and various RSS and API integration. If that can be added to the mix at a later date, AuctionAds as a conduit for Ebay is going to be huge."
There are plenty of other reviews of AuctionAds by 5 Star Affiliates, Modern Street, Techcrunch, John Chow, Google Blogoscoped and more.
With Openads you could very quickly experiment with AuctionAds to find out if it will work for you. Do you think your readers might be interested in eBay auctions related to your website? Why not try it for yourself today?
I did a site running AuctionAds. toBid.info
Comment by Hong Xiaowan — July 5, 2007 @ 2:07 am
I have been trying out AuctionAds for a 72hr period. I have to report that the ad display failure rate is around 60-70% so far. Meaning 60-70% of the time either nothing appears )as in no HTML is returned at all) or there is a block stating that the browser cannot display the content.
I was hopeful this service would work but, after this past 72hrs I cannot say it works at all.
Comment by BreckLundin — July 8, 2007 @ 5:58 pm
I’m sorry to hear about that. I’d be surprised if the service really was that unreliable, I wonder if it’s a configuration issue.
Can anyone else give their experience using AuctionAds? Does it work reliably for you?
cheers, Oliver
Note: best place for Openads support is the forum
Comment by Oliver George — July 9, 2007 @ 9:22 am
Very interesting. I had never heard of them and since my blog is only 3 days old and not yet allowed in adsense, I decided to try it it out before the mandatory 3 month slow time in a new blog.
Thanks for the information
Comment by tony rich — July 10, 2007 @ 11:55 pm
AuctionAds does seem to be a good tool for product oriented blogs and websites. I just signed up last night and am looking forward to what the system can do for my blog at http://www.ineedweddinghelp.com.
Comment by Sarah Evans — July 18, 2007 @ 1:58 pm
Hi Tony,
It’s been a few weeks since your comment. I see you’re still running AuctionAds on your website. I wondered how it is working out for you.
cheers, Oliver
Comment by Oliver George — July 25, 2007 @ 4:40 pm
Hi Sarah,
How did AuctionAds work out for you. In theory it seems to be a great match for a wedding website.
cheers, Oliver
Comment by Oliver George — July 25, 2007 @ 4:42 pm
i have been running auctionnads for about 2 months now, all was ok in the first month. after that they ”updated” some feature and the reports come out wrong. I usually get 50,000 views per day and would get an average of 500 clicks a day, after the so called update i get 5 clicks, support says thats correct. Oh yes and support…. thats another story, personally i think its some snot nose kid with an attitude that answers (if your lucky) support mail
Comment by evan — September 17, 2007 @ 7:48 am
[...] Also Openads.org (formally known as PhpAdsNew) , by far the biggest and best adserver software on the market, also gave AuctionAds a bit of love in this nice post. [...]
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