Don’t put PPC ads on directories

by Sapphire (April 6, 2006)

This site is a blog and a directory, as you probably know. I have one other site that’s similar. Both were doing well on AdBrite: this one was fetching a nice price for ads, and selling them regularly, while the other was going gangbusters with the “intermission ads”. At first, I only had the AdBrite ads on the blogs - not the directories.

I allow AdBrite to set my ad prices, because they seem to have a good sense of what the market will bear, and I’m still learning from the whole thing. Their sales page for your individual site gives you some very interesting stats: the number of unique users seeing the ads, the average value of a click, where the majority of your traffic is coming from, etc. I thought it would be smart to put AdBrite ads on the directories, too, causing that many more ad impressions to be factored into the value of my adspace. I was wrong.

After I put AdBrite on the directory pages of both sites, guess what happened? Suddenly, my CPC value plummeted to 3 cents (it had been over $1 at one point), and the majority of my traffic is being reported as from India instead of the US. My conclusion: the vast majority of directory traffic is from India, and PPC advertisers just won’t pay as much for Indian traffic as some other regions (presumably because the clicks haven’t historically led to sales).

So I’ve removed AdBrite from my directory pages. I’m going to stick Chitika or something on there - it’s never worked for me, so I’m not out anything by slapping it on there. AdBrite, on the other hand, I want to do anything possible to keep in high gear.

Posted in Ad Networks, PPC
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