Friday, February 29, 2008

Optimize Your Earnings by Updating Your Code

Our team is really focused on providing innovative ads that complement your blog and publisher sites as well as earn you a competitive CPM. Since WidgetBucks is focused on shopping advertisements today (more to come on new types of ads coming soon), we want to make sure that we keep earning you a solid CPM after the shopping season (advertising rates are seasonal and tend go down after the holidays). In short, we’re deploying our ad optimizing technology, YieldSense, broadly across our publisher base.

In order for you to take advantage of this, we need you to update your WidgetBucks code. To do this, simply re-copy the HTML code of your widgets into your site and start optimizing your revenue. Incidentally, this is an existing code update request originally announced Dec. 11.

Once that code is updated, WidgetBucks publishers can earn money in three ways: 1) existing shopping CPC ads, 2) display CPM ads (see explanation post here), and 3) international CPM ads.

We have moved quickly to implement our yield management technology after extensive testing with select customers. Moving quickly presents its share of challenges. For example, we had to decide between immediately activating the “hybrid” ad widgets BEFORE having our reporting interface ready to go, or wait to let publishers earn the additional revenue until the reporting was completed. The priority was clearly to optimize your revenue. That still puts us in a position to communicate (and risk confusing some of you) where and when “hybrid” revenue will start appearing. Here's a time line of what to expect:

Stage 1 (Feb. 27 to ~March 7)

  • Publishers will begin seeing “hybrid” ad CPM revenue appearing as “CPM Revenue” in the My Widgets page, typically 2-3 days delayed.
  • You may notice a drop in CTR and/or impressions when “hybrid” ads are active, since the Shopping CPC widget is not visible until the display ad completes. Keep in mind that although your CPC CTR/Revenue may decrease, it is offset by the CPM earnings from the display ad.

Stage 2 (~March 7 -14)
  • CPM Revenue will be split into “Display Ad CPM” and “International CPM” to distinguish between the CPM revenue earned through the “hybrid” display ads versus the international CPM revenue

- Dean

3 comments:

Cool Guy said...

Wow great technology please implement as early as possible....

Chris Campbell said...

Is it possible to not have the display ads appear? They don't seem very relevant to my website. My widgets were for Digital Cameras only, which is very relevant to my site visitors, and was therefore getting great CTR. I suspect this change will actually hurt my revenues.

Dean Jutilla said...

CPM display ads for US and Canada traffic are not optional for publishers. To make the CPM ads as relevant to your content as possible, please be sure to categorize your blog or site (on either your edit widget page or MySettings). This will bring in relevant or closely relevant CPM ads before your CPC shopping widget.