It has been just over a month since we launched Video Ads. In that time they have been taken up well by Publishers with 27 sites currently publishing Video Ads.

Initially we set the pricing for the Run of Network (RON) ads based on what we thought would be a realistic and fair price considering the nature of a video ad and their ability to deliver a much more targeted visitor.

After analysing the Video Ads in the network, including pricing on Publisher sites, CTRs, conversion rates etc… we have decided to reduce the price of the Video Ad RONs. Now for a $50 campaign (not targeted), you will pay 11.99c a click instead of the 24c it was previously.

This price reduction was also made to encourage our Advertisers to have a go! Video Ads are extremely powerful and work well. We have plenty of Publishers ready to deliver your message!

We do understand a lot of Advertisers simply do not have a video ad they can use. They are very easy to make however, read our how to guide at http://blog.adtoll.com/2007/11/06/create-your-own-video-ad/

In the next week sometime we will also be recommending a service that you can have make a Video Ad for you! It is very affordable and the results are outstanding. More on that soon! In the meantime take advantage of the lower Video Ad RON prices.

We are proud to have just released the new “Autopricing” feature for Publishers! Never again do your ad prices need to be out of date, wrong or just out of balance with the market.

Let our new system calculate the price of your ad space and benefit from not only having realistic and up to date prices, but save yourself a heap of time in administrative effort!

How does “Autopricing” work? The system uses a special formula that takes a number of key factors and calculates a price. These factors include ad format, current bookings (supply/demand), expected clicks etc…

It is a very smart system that adjusts your prices for example based on the market. If you have plenty of available ad spots it lowers the price, if you are booked out it raises the price. In essence, it balances your price based on the market.

You do have some control over the determined price through the Pricing Strategy you nominate. You can choose from five different strategies. As an example, if you are trying to fill ad inventory quickly or encourage impulse buys you might select “Cheap”. If you consider your ads to be worth a lot and do not want low-end Advertisers you might go for “Exclusive”. Or you can choose a strategy in the middle somewhere.

To set up “Autopricing” simply edit your Ad Groups from the My Account area. The Ad Group screen has been made neater and now includes a whole area on pricing as you can see in the example below.

We consider “Autopricing” to be one of our new trademark features here at AdToll and we hope you take advantage of it!

We would like to sincerely apologise for the downtime you experienced over the last few days (approx. 60 hours). We realise how important AdToll is to our customers and this downtime has had a widespread impact, which will be adequately compensated for.

We respect and value our customers and therefore believe in being open and transparent in our actions.

THE DISASTER

At approximately 7:30 PM on the 24th Nov 2007 (Australian WST), AdToll became unavailable. At that time we attempted to contact technical staff at our hosting company; we were unable to even log in to our account to do so. We found a way of getting in contact with them and then learnt our account had been terminated and our servers turned off. Apparently we were in breach of a particular service condition, which initially struck us as very strange.

After careful investigation of this issue, it became apparent that the termination of our account was pre-mature and unjust. From the moment AdToll went down we were on the phone to technical staff to try and resolve the issue but were unable to do so due to availability of staff over the weekend.

Some of you are wondering why we did not order a new server, restore the database and get AdToll operational as quickly as possible. The answer is simple! The secure FTP we use for our backups was under the hosting account and once they terminated the account we were unable to access the backup area.

It was not until Monday morning that we were able to communicate with the right department to reactivate our account and servers. At 7:00 AM on the 27^th Nov 2007 we had AdToll operational.

CUSTOMER COMPENSATION

We realise there will be a backlash from our customers and we accept full responsibility. We again apologise and hope we can make it up to you by continuing to provide outstanding service and platform enhancements.

To compensate for the approximately 60 hours of downtime:

Publishers will receive Run of Network earnings for the 25-Nov-2007 and 26-Nov-2007 equal to their earnings from the 23-Nov-2007; and

Advertisers who had Sponsored Ads active between 24-Nov-2007 7:30 PM (Aust WST) and 27-Nov-2007 7:00 AM (Aust WST) will receive Account Credit for the period their ad was affected. On top of that we will also give an extra day of compensation to cater for the situation whereby Publishers removed the ad groups and needed time to get them back onto their sites.

WHAT WE WILL DO TO ENSURE THIS NEVER HAPPENS AGAIN

We have already begun reviewing and making changes to our Disaster Recovery Plan as to ensure this does not occur again. This includes;

Enhancements to our back up procedures.

Improving communication in case of disaster.

Building greater rapport with our hosting company.

We thank you for your support and patience during this time and we looking forward to working with you in the future.

Let’s face it, a lot of web site owners are not marketers or salesman and just don’t know the value of their ad spaces. There’s also web site owners who just simply don’t have the time to keep on top of the pricing of ads on their sites. At the moment our Publishers need to update the pricing of their ad spaces on a daily basis. That means a lot of wasted time!

Our new “Autopricing” feature will allow Publishers to have our system automatically set the price of their Ad Groups.

We have developed a relatively simple yet powerful formula to determine what the price of an ad space is worth. This formula considers factors such as the ad format, current bookings (supply/demand), expected clicks etc…

Taking these factors into account, our system keeps Publisher’s ad space pricing up to date on a regular basis. It requires no intervention form the Publisher.

We will give the Publisher some flexibility of course offering them a choice of pricing strategy such as Premium, Normal or Bargain. This strategy will be a factor in determining the price our system formulates.

Publishers may choose Premium if they consider their ads to be worth a lot and do not want low-end Advertisers. If a Publisher is trying to fill ad inventory quickly or encourage impulse buys they might opt for the Bargain pricing.

“Autopricing” will help our Publishers not only save time but help keep their prices realistic, up to date and aligned with market demands.

We expect to release “Autopricing” within the next 2 weeks so keep an eye out for it!

A lot of people are curious as to how our network holds up as far as available ad inventory, especially in particular relation to categories/verticals.

Advertisers in particular are interested in this information as it allows them to estimate potential traffic on their Run of Network campaigns. On top of that it gives them an idea of what verticals our network is dominated by, which can help them if they are looking for affiliate programs to advertise through our network.

From the beginning of the launch right up until 2 or 3 weeks ago, ‘Entertainment & Games’ completely dominated, accounting for 70-80% of the entire network ad views.

Since the introduction of our Video Ads on the 28th of October and our aggressive promotional campaign starting a couple of weeks ago, we have witnessed a shift in network dominance.

As you can see from the pie chart above, the ‘Entertainment & Games’ category now only accounts for just over 50% of our network ad views. This is a significant decrease but one we feel signifies the fact our network is slowly maturing as other categories become popular.

The ‘Adult’ category has really started to pick up with a 29% network share. This is great news as the adult industry is huge (as everyone knows) and this is likely to attract a whole range of new Advertisers from that industry.

The remainder of the network ad views is divided amongst the rest of the categories with ‘Business & Finance’, ‘Internet & Technology’, ‘Online Communities’ and ‘Shopping & Travel’ being the major categories there holding between 4% and 6% of the network share each.

As you can see AdToll is currently dominated by the ‘Entertainment & Games’ and the ‘Adult’ categories. This doesn’t come as much of a surprise to us considering the type of sites that fall under these categories in particular ‘Entertainment & Games’, which encompasses online games, flash arcade, video sharing sites etc…

Due to the domination by these two categories we have discussed rearranging the categories to better suit our network. These categories were decided upon pre-launch and now, after 5 months in operation it might be time to make adjustments based on where our network has steered.

Nothing has been decided as of yet but it is in the pipeline in the near future, watch this space!

Perth, WA, November 15, 2007 - AdToll.com, the premier advertisement management network, which was launched worldwide on June 18, 2007, has transformed their Affiliate Program.

This transformation was initiated through the feedback of existing affiliates who felt there was a gap in the offering. After investigation and research of market trends and leaders, AdToll restructured the new program which they believe to be not only competitive, but market leading.

The new Affiliate Program rewards for referring new customers whether they be an Advertiser or a Publisher. Affiliates earn a 20% commission on profit generated through referred Advertisers for 90 days and a 10% commission on profit generated through referred Publishers for 365 days.

The majority of advertising agencies offering an affiliate program only offer rewards for referring on Publishers. However, AdToll also offers rewards for referring on Advertisers - this is a bonus for AdToll Affiliates looking to maximise their earning potential.

The owner of AdToll describes the new Affiliate Program enhancements as, “Another positive step forward for our platform that continues to evolve, take chances and help shape the industry.”

For more information on the new Affiliate Program visit the web site at http://www.adtoll.com/

For Additional Information, Contact
Contact Name: Dan Rucci
Company Name: Purplex Pty Ltd
Telephone Number +61 40 360 8056
Email Address: info@adtoll.com

We have just released our new Affiliate Program!

Thanks to anyone who provided feedback, we took it all on board and have put together what we believe to be an attractive and more importantly a competitive affiliate program structure.

What changes can you expect?

Changes in Commission Structure

Affiliates now receive commission for referring Advertisers and Publishers to AdToll.

• 20% commission on profit made from Advertisers (90 day period); and

• 10% commission on profit made from Publishers (365 day period).

Enhanced Reporting

From your account area you have access to enhanced affiliate reporting where you can see details of each referral including their country, the referring URL they came from and if they came through one of your Ad Groups.

To top this off you can see a visual representation of this data for the last 30 days in the form of charts.

We believe these new improvements put our Affiliate Program up there with the best and are looking forward to seeing the results. We wish our affiliates the best of luck with the new program and hope it works for you!

As part of a new promotional campaign we had John Chow review AdToll on his very popular blog JohnChow.com. The review gave us exposure to thousands of webmasters and internet marketers which helped create a “buzz” for AdToll.

The campaign has been a complete success and we were able to increase our Publisher base which in turn lifted our network ad views. This also attracted Advertisers to our network and gave our existing Advertisers more opportunity.

What a lot of people (in particular webmasters) are interested in, are the effects of such a high profile review. I saw this pop up in a forum once so I thought I would borrow the phrase; The “John Chow Effect”.

In essence the “John Chow Effect” is an indication of the “buzz” a review on JohnChow.com created. The results speak for themselves and on the first day of the review we had a daily Alexa rank of 7,985 and since then our Alexa has hovered around the 10-20k range.

Alexa Daily Traffic Rank Trend

FireFox Alexa Extension

This drop in Alexa was obviously brought about by the traffic generated by the review. You can also see the FireFox Alexa Extension above which shows an updated Alexa Rank (3 month average) after the review as well as the 4 month trend graph.

On the right hand side of the graph you can see the graph skyrocket and marked with a blue dot on the upper edge. I can only assume this means it goes off the chart! I did try and find if there was any real significance with the blue dot but I wasn’t able to find anything on Google after searching for a couple of minutes.

If you do know exactly what the blue dot refers to I would love to know, please get in contact with me!

By now you are probably saying to youself “Who cares we all know Alexa is flawed!“. This is common knowledge in this industy however we also know that the Alexa ranking is heavily skewed towards websites which have a large webmaster/tech audience. What that means is that we are able to compare our own Alexa rank with other sites attracting the same industry audience and it provides a best-fit basis for comparison.

I realise a lot of webmasters despise Alexa and they have their reasons. I personally like Alexa and I do know it has limitations and is flawed but when used as a tool it can be very useful. I am getting a little off topic so I think I’ll leave discussion on Alexa for another blog entry!

John Chow has what I believe to be almost a cult following and internet marketers and bloggers look up to him for advice, direction and recommendation. This authority induced a “dominoe effect”; other blog owners are publishing articles about AdToll! That means free, quality back links from related sites, which we all know Google absolutely love.

Overall we are very happy with the review and encourage anyone looking to create some “buzz” for their site to consider the service offered by John Chow. That really is all I have to say about our “John Chow Effect” at AdToll. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoy writing these blog entries for you.

We have had a lot of feedback from affiliates and interested parties on our current Affiliate Program.

We were given praise for having an Affiliate Program however the main concern was the fact that our Affiliate Program rewarded for signing up Advertisers, which is not the norm for an ad network. Most reward for signing up Publishers, which affiliates seem to love.

Due to this feedback and demand from our affiliates we are in the process of restructuring our Affiliate Program which we plan to release in the coming week.

I hear you saying “So what changes can we expect?”

To begin with you will see a change in the structure whereby affiliates will now earn:

1) 20% commission on profit brought in by Advertisers (for 90 days); and

2) 10% commission on profit brought in by Publishers (for 365 days).

That’s a huge improvement and means our Affiliates have greater earning potential!

Affiliates in general gave us similarly themed feedback, one of course regarding commissions and the other about reporting. Most ad networks offering an Affiliate Program have very poor reporting, most of the time no reporting. We plan to rectify this here at AdToll and our Affiliates will have access to very powerful reporting.

…. and again I here you saying “What information will be reported?”

Well, we have designed our reporting to be useful to our Affiliates. The reporting will provide information on every customer they sign up including their country, referring URL and even the ad group the sign up came through (if any).

We will be topping this off with a few graphs providing visual aid, summarising the last 30 days activities.

We do expect our reporting to evolve over time as we gather feedback however we do feel it is a great start to what we hope will be yet another point of difference for our platform. We believe our Affiliates will take on board the new structure with open arms which will in turn bring in more customers to AdToll helping growth and success.

We plan on releasing the new Affiliate Program in the next week so keep a close eye on the site and this blog.

Today a review on BloggingFingers was published. Have a read of the review by clicking the image below.

CLICK to view the AdToll review on BloggingFingers.