A couple of weeks ago, the team at Performancing launched their newest blog advertising solution by name the PerformancingAds. Performancing has been experimenting around with various Ad services for a couple of years now and hopefully they will make it big this time around. Though I had prepared this review a few days back, I thought waiting until it started showing some results and the following are the findings from the initial trials.

A totally new concept and why?

The PerformancingAds brings in a new concept altogether by merging the traffic needs and monetary aspects of blogs. In other words, it is a solution invented by the bloggers for bloggers. So every aspect from traffic exchanges, appearance of their website and the ad blocks properties themselves have the emphasis of typical blogs’ and bloggers’ needs.

How does it work and what are the key features?

The PerformancingAds solution works as follows:


PerformancingAds

  • As mentioned earlier, only bloggers can sign up as publishers and only 125×125 square ads (text or image) are permitted. You can choose three top categories to describe your blog.
  • You need to have a single sign up to use the new system as an advertiser, publisher or just to use it for ad exchange
  • Simple ad exchange program available whereby you earn credits for displaying others ads and use those credits to advertise your blog. This can bring in good quality traffic to your blog
  • You can set the price for your own ad spaces and it is a flat rate system on a weekly basis. i.e. When you specify that you want to sell your ad slot for $5, that is the amount that the advertisers pay for a week. PerformancingAds keep 40% of that ($2 in our example) as their commission.
  • All ad spaces are placed in their marketplace from where the advertisers can book them. Once the ad is booked for the agreed bid price, the publisher has the chance to reject it within 24 hours. If not rejected the ad will run for the following week
  • Publishers have the chance to design their ad regions (one single ad or a number of ads in a single block) to suite their blog themes. More ads in a block will ensure rotation among ads. A blog can have multiple such regions defined
  • The ad can run on any blog platform that supports PHP (they have recently added a Javascript version of the ad as well) and there are easy-to-install plugins available for Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal blogs.
  • The referral program is very attractive whereby each publisher or advertiser that you referred will fetch you $10 and in addition 5% of the ad revenue for life from your advertiser referrals.
  • All payments are done via PayPal and on a monthly basis (Current month’s earning will be paid on first week of next month)
  • There is no minimum traffic or other ranking requirements for a site to sign up with PerformancingAds

First impressions

Though I started using the PerformancingAds on this site about ten days ago, there was no response at all for the first few days from any potential advertiser. Then I reduced the default ad slot price ($2.50 per week per ad) gradually until I received a booking for $1.00 a week. PerformancingAds does not allow you to price your ad slots for less than $0.50.

As for the ad exchanges, I am yet to see any good response. Perhaps, a lot of advertisers and publishers are still under experiments with this solution. Also, more established blogs must be the initial target of the advertisers before tier II blogs get their turns.
PerformancingAds

The user interface for publishers and advertisers is fairly simple. However, if you are in doubt, there is not much help available though there is a FAQ page that does not answer everything.

As for the marketplace for advertisers, I found that it is very hard to search for certain categories of blogs that you want to advertise. They should have provided some advance search interfaces as well to spot that exact blog that you want to advertise on.

Simplicity of the whole system is the best thing about PerformancingAds. By sticking to only one ad size for text as well as image ads, they have made a whole lot of things easier. Also, the same account acting as advertiser and publisher is a good thing. The sign up process is faster and so to get started it does not take even a day! Having a great referral program is the other major advantage of PerformancingAds.

On the negative side, they could have made the whole website a little more intuitive and searchable. Also, it is yet to show any major impact in terms of fill rate and booking of the ads by advertisers. I searched through the marketplace and found that even some great blogs with very high traffic is not having enough fill rate. May be things will soon change when they have a better user interface to search for ad slots. Also, the ads of various Performancing offerings keep on getting displayed, if you don’t have any advertisers signed up. This will earn credits for you that you can use for ad exchange.

Tips for publishers

  • Start with the ad exchange option from day one itself so that it will increase your traffic credits
  • Use more than one region so that the highly visible hotspots can be used for monetizing and less visible or below the fold slots for ad exchanges
  • You can restrict the ad rotation by creating an ad block with only one ad

If you liked what you just read you may sign up with PerformancingAds now and start earning money and generating traffic for your blog! Also, please let me know how your experience with PerformancingAds has been.