Regan Cunliffe

On the 26th of May I attended the Interactive Marketing Summit.  About the only thing I can remember from the day was the complete disrespect for web publishers that one of the speakers had.  While their job is to help advertisers get more bang for their buck, their methodology left a number of us publishers who use[d] their service gobsmacked.

By understanding how difficult it is for publishers to make any amount of reasonable coin advertising networks can pretty much offer next to nothing as incentives to publishers because they know that there is very few other alternatives.  Where a fully booked campaign can cost an advertiser around $25 per thousand impressions, various ad networks can serve the same campaign with significantly lower revenue for the publisher.

I’ve started to notice this more and more.  On Throng recently I’ve seen our 728×90, 160×600 and 300×250 ad blocks all filled by a Vodafone campaign served by Google Adsense.  I’ve had some people asking me how stoked we must be to have Vodafone advertising on the site but have had to tell them that while that  block out could have cost them $75 per thousand for the three zones, in reality it was returning less than a dollar.

This got me to thinking.  As an advertiser, if I can book a campaign through Google Adwords and experience the same results I would for a fraction of the cost then really, you’d be stupid not to.  However, as a publisher your traffic is incredibly valuable and by allowing campaigns such as the Vodafone one to display, we actually devalue what we have to sell.

One of the things that I’m noticing more and more is advertisers using services like First Rate’s The Performance Network for branding while disguising them as Cost Per Click or Cost Per Action campaigns.  There is currently a campaign for Prime Television for one of their shows and is a CPC campaign.  Now you’d think that having a TV show related ad on a site like Throng would work really well.  Here is the ad and the numbers:

19,344 impressions served resulting in $33  in revenue at $1 per click.

Looking at the ad, it’s obvious that the information the advertiser is wanting to get across is there and clicking is therefore pointless.  Even more so if you do click and discover that all you’re directed to is Prime’s listings page.

Any advertising using a CPC or CPA campaign for blatant branding should not be accepted by publishers and as such I have systematically begun to remove such campaigns via Adsense’s Competitive Ad Filter and stopped serving anything from The Performance Network.

Bye Bye Vodafone.  Bye Bye McDonalds.   Bye Bye Yahoo!Xtra.  And goodbye to anyone else who thinks they can get away with using any of my online properties for branding with banners listed as CPC without any incentive to click.