Performancing launches Performancing Ads

Ryan Caldwell, owner of the hugely popular blogging community Performancing, yesterday announced the launch of their new ad network PerformancingAds. The networks main focus is the 125×125 banner format which makes sense since this is the most popular ad size amongst bloggers at the moment.

Here is a quick summary of this new network and my thoughts about the network so far. Please note that this should not be considered as a full review. I have only been using the site for a few hours so there may be problems I am not aware of and good features which I have missed

First Impressions

Overall, my first impressions of the site are good. Anyone who has signed up to BuySellAds should feel comfortable browsing around the site. I’m not 100% sure but I suspect PerformancingAds are using the same script (AWS) as BuySellAds as the site has the same kind of structure and feel, particularly the marketplace. In my opinion this is a good thing, I’m a huge fan of simplicity with ad networks, something which sites like Linkworth have messed up on.

PerformancingAds also uses one login for Publishers, Advertisers and Affiliates. In my opinion this should always be the case but in the past we have seen sites like PayPerPost require users to sign up with different accounts if they wanted to be a Publisher and an Advertiser. Even PPP’s successor SocialSpark requires you to switch from Blogger to Advertiser which granted isn’t that much of a hassle however I see no reason why everything can’t be in the one login and thankfully, PerformancingAds does have this.

Publishers

The registration process is incredibly easy. All you enter is your name, email and paypal email address and click submit. An email is then sent to you with your password and you are good to go!

Once you have added a site to your account you can add an ad region. Regions are incredibly easy to set up. Here’s a screenprint of the Add a Region page.

As you can see, you do have some control over how ads are displayed. You can fit the ad zone into your blog very easily, all you have to do is choose how many ads across and how many ads down you want. Also, you can set the margin, decide whether links have nofollow, set the price and ban sites which use certain keywords. I have added two banners to the BloggingTips sidebar at the top (the top two banners are from Performancing, the bottom 4 are not). As you can see, no adspace is wasted. The first banner tells people that they can advertise in that position and the second banner displays a network advert. Also, PerformancingAds adds your affiliate link to the Advertise Here link so you will also get credit for anyone signing up through that banner.

Adding the banner code to your site is incredibly easy. For example, with WordPress all you need to do is upload a plugin and then place a small piece of PHP code in your sidebar template.

Once you have ads up you will be able to see statistics. The reports section is quite basic but for a simple ad marketplace like this it will certainly do the job.

There are two features for Publishers which I think will help PerformancingAds get ahead of the competition.

• Book Region - If you have unsold ad space you can book your own ads in one week intervals. This means you can display your own affiliate banners until you sell some ads. A good feature which unfortunately a lot of ad networks still don’t offer.
• Exchange Ads - This feature is essentially just a banner exchange service however it’s a great feature to incorporate into the system. You can create as many exchange ads as you want and target any category you want too. It uses a simple credit system so the more ads you display the more ad credits you have to advertise on other blogs and websites who use PerformancingAds.

Advertisers

Advertisers have the option of using a text or image to advertise their website. Link text and image alt text are limited to 30 characters and just like publishers, you have to attach your website to 3 categories.

At the moment PerformancingAds are offering $25 off your first purchase of $100 or more, which is a pretty good deal in my opinion. The marketplace is very easy to navigate. You can search sites by category and all sites are displayed with a thumbnail with a note of the sites Alexa Rank underneath it.

When you click on one of the thumbnails, you are taken to a page with more information about the site. As I mentioned before, this page is almost idential to the information pages in BuySellAds marketplace, which is no bad thing. Sites are priced on a per weekly basis and there is a note whether the ads will have a nofollow link or not. There is also information on the sites Alexa Rank, Google PageRank, Technorati Rank, Yahoo Inbound Links and the number of BlogLines Subscribers too.

Affiliates

PerformancingAds have a pretty good affiliate program. You get $10 for each new publisher or advertiser you refer plus 5% recurring revenue on all advertiser ad buys for life. They have banners to attract both Publishers and Advertisers in 4 ad sizes : 468×60, 728×90, 125×125 and 300×250. A nice addition to what looks like a good advertising service.

Payment

According to Ryan Caldwell, you get paid on the 1st of the month via PayPal immediately following the advertisers’ purchase. Unfortunately, Publishers get a poor deal in my opinion as Performancing takes 50% of any revenue generated through your banner ads (contrast this with BuySellAds who take a 25% cut).

Regular readers will know how I feel about this kind of thing. In my opinion, 50% is way too much for any advertising company to take, particularly for advertising sites such as this which are more of a marketplace than a traditional advertising company. I do like use external advertising solutions as it’s less work for me and it exposes my banner areas to a wider advertising audience. However, when a company is taking 50% it makes me think that selling ads privately is a much better solution, at least in the long term.

OverView

Although I’m disappointed with the high percentage that Performancing takes from it’s Publishers, I have to say that my first impressions of this ad network are good.

I have referred to BuySellAds many times in this post for 2 reasons. Firstly, because they use a pretty much identical script and secondly, because they are trying to target the same market. I was very impressed with BuySellAds when they first launched and their email support was top notch. However, their were a lot of bugs in their system and this held me back from using them. PerformancingAds seems to have addressed some of these problems, in particular the ability to add your own banners to your zone is a welcome one, as is the affiliate program and the banner exchange service.

I will be using PerformancingAds in the next few weeks and by that time I should have a more complete view about this advertising network. They are backed by SplashPress so I’m hoping that the network gets good exposure and I will sell some ads along the way. If that happens, the 50% cut they take will be justified ie. 50% of something is better than 100% of nothing!

If you display 125×125 banner ads on your blog, I recommend checking them out. If you do sign up, please let me know what you think about the network. Also, if you decide to review the network yourself on your own blog, feel free to post a link to your post in your comment

Link : PerformancingAds