AdBrite Blog

It’s my pleasure to welcome Daniel Issen as our new Vice President of Engineering at AdBrite.

Daniel joins AdBrite from eBay, where he held a number of leadership positions within the PayPal and eBay organizations over the past 6 years. Of course, Daniel has a strong engineering team behind him that works day and night to improve AdBrite for you.

Over the past year, AdBrite has made several key additions to its executive team, tapping talent from successful advertising, media, and technology businesses. AdBrite’s management team includes former executives from eBay, Shopping.com, PayPal, Yahoo!, AOL, E*TRADE, IAC, Salesforce.com, and Check Point Software.

To learn more, take a look at the hiring announcement and our executive team page.

Best,
Iggy Fanlo
AdBrite CEO

Advertisers, you may already know that you can optimize bids on a site-by-site basis to maximize conversions at your target price.

But, ever wonder exactly how it’s done? We’ve collected some tips from our best and brightest at AdBrite.

Before you get started, you’ll need an AdBrite conversion code so you can track conversions and CPA by site. See our recent post for step-by-step instructions on adding a conversion code.

Once your code is live, there are three easy steps for optimizing your campaign to maximize conversions.

1) Bid high to maximize your exposure

Start with a high bid to maximize your exposure and see which sites convert for you. If the market rate for banners is $1 CPM, try a $2 or $3 CPM bid. Likewise for CPC text bids – if the market is 20 cents per click, try a 50 cent bid. With AdBrite’s market-based pricing, you’ll only pay a penny more than the next-highest bidder, so you’ll typically pay less than your max bid.

Do this for a few days. You’ll quickly run on thousands of sites, and get valuable data about how your campaign is converting on each site.

2) Optimize bids by site

Now the fun starts. Armed with lots of rich site-level conversion data, we’ll optimize our campaign and drive up conversions at our target CPA. For everything that follows, go to the “For advertisers” tab on AdBrite, click on an individual campaign, and then click the “Sites” tab to see site-level conversion data.

First, let’s pause all non-converting sites. Among the thousands of sites in AdBrite’s network, some may work for us, and others won’t. No problem. Simply sort by spend and pause all sites that have zero conversions.

Before:

After:

Next, reduce bids on sites converting above our target CPA. To do this, simply sort by CPA, from highest to lowest. For sites that are converting, but above our target CPA, let’s reduce our bid price and see if we can get conversions at a lower bid price.

In this example, the campaign is converting, but above our $20 CPA target. To get our CPA down to $20, we’ll lower our bid by 54% to $1.39, and see if we’re able to get impressions and conversions. Note: if the new bid is below the minimum bid allowed, then pause the site.

Finally, increase bids on sites converting below our target CPA. This may seem strange – if we’re converting at a great CPA, why should we increase our bid? The answer is that these are our best-converting sites. There may be even more conversions available to us, and we should bid aggressively to go get them. Again, with auction-based pricing, you’ll never pay more and often will pay less than your max bid.

In this case, our current CPA for this site is $14.06, well below our target of $20. We should be willing to bid more than we’re currently paying to make sure we lock in inventory and conversions on this site! Specifically, we’ll raise our bid to $2.65 (142% of our current bid) in order to secure more impressions on this site.

3) Increase daily budget to drive more conversions

You’ve now taken the first steps towards running a network campaign with site-level optimization. If done properly, you’ll be converting below our target CPA on all the sites on which we’re running, and will have a super-effective campaign in place. Give yourself a pat on the back!

Now, it’s time to scale up your spend to capture more conversions. This part is easy. Simply raise max daily budget for the campaign to make sure we’re capturing all of the available inventory that will convert for us.

See what happens, and repeat the steps above to drive the most conversions possible at your target CPA!

Benny Blum
Manager, Account Services

This morning we had an article published on iMedia Connection, covering the topic of ad network transparency.

The key point is this: advertisers and publishers no longer need to choose between site representation networks, which offers transparency, but only for hand-selected premium inventory, and the “blind” network, which offers low-cost bulk inventory, but without disclosure of specific sites represented.

Open ad marketplaces - AdBrite foremost among them - offer big pools of publisher inventory at market-based prices, *and* have the benefit of full site-level transparency.

Take a look at the article and let us know what you think!

Today we launched Spottt, a service that makes it easy for websites to promote each other for free (woo!)

The concept is simple: by joining, Spottt members agree to display ads for other members. It’s automated, and uses a small snippet of HTML that can be inserted into any web page, including blogs and MySpace profiles. The amount of free advertising members receive is directly proportional to the amount they give to others. Spottt ads are 125×125 pixels.

If you’re a publisher, Spottt is not a replacement for AdBrite, and Spottt won’t make you money. But it will bring you new traffic, all for free.

And for reading this far, you get free Spottt credits Sign up at www.spottt.com with the promotion code “ADBRITEPUB” (without the quotes) and we’ll deposit 1,000 free bonus credits into your Spottt account.

Rock on,
Philip

Hi folks,

Just got a note from PK that he’ll be in New York tomorrow, keynoting an iBreakfast conference.

If you’re around, stop by and say hello.

Here’s some more detail:
http://web20ny.com/