ePassporte is now available as a payment option. This is part of our ongoing commitment to our customers to deliver exceptional service and features.

Depositing funds into Account Credit
ePassport Business Account holders: No fee, minimum of $20 deposit. *Currently available, contact your Account Manager.
ePassport Personal Account holders: ePpurchase facility will be setup for Personal Account holders, fee will apply, minimum of $20 deposit. *Not yet available.

ePassporte is also available for Publishers to receive payment. $2 payment fee, minimum earnings of $20. (To any ePassport account). *This option will be available in the account area in the next few days.

Please check the ePassporte fee schedule for fees you may incur during transactions.

If you haven’t heard of Entrecard.com then you should take a look! In essence it is a traffic exchange that bloggers everywhere are taking on board and are experiencing some great results.

We are using Entrecard ourselves which you can see on the bottom left hand side of this blog.

Entrecard uses a system of credits that you earn and which you can then spend on advertising on other sites using Entrecard.

Entrecard contests are nothing new; there’s many blogs holding contests giving away credits however this contest is the biggest of it’s kind.

We are giving away 13,000 Entrecard credits! To this date the largest contest has been for around 2,000 credits.

Anyone is eligible to enter this contest so have a go and you could WIN!

To enter this contest these are the requirements:

• Write a review on your blog/site about AdToll consisting of at least 200 words. If you have already written a review on AdToll in the past then you could write an update on some of our new features.
• The review must include a link to AdToll (www.adtoll.com) and a link to this contest (http://blog.adtoll.com/2007/12/28/13000-entrecardcom-credit-giveaway-by-adtollcom/).
• The review must include our logo or an affiliate program banner - https://www.adtoll.com/affiliate_links.php
• The review on your blog/site must be dugg (digg.com) and stumbled (stumbleupon.com).
• This contest (http://blog.adtoll.com/2007/12/28/13000-entrecardcom-credit-giveaway-by-adtollcom/) must also be dugg and stumbled.
• Once you have satisfied the above you need to post a comment on this contest (you will need to sign-up), and provide the link to the review on your blog/site.

This contest will end on the 31st January 2008 at which time 3 random entries will be drawn and the winners announced on the 1st of February 2008.

Prizes are as follows:

• 1st - 10,000 credits
• 2nd - 2,000 credits
• 3rd - 1,000 credits

Good luck to everyone that enters!

We wanted to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and hope you have a safe festive season!

This year we sent out Christmas cards to all of our Australian members. We apologise to our international members but we simply didn’t have the capacity to write any more cards, although we wanted to!

We have already heard back from a lot of customers who received Christmas cards and we do appreciate all the feedback and greetings from them all.

Our service will continue as per normal throughout the holidays so please do not hesitate to get in contact with us if need be.

Thank you for your support over the last 6 months. We look forward to working with all of our customers in the new near year to help them achieve their goals.

To give everyone a heads up we will be announcing a contest in the next week where we will be giving away over 5,000 entrecard.com credits! This will be the biggest contest of it’s kind ever and we are really looking forward to it.

Again… Merry Christmas and have a relaxing, enjoyable and safe holiday season!

This month has seen a significant change in network ad inventory with our ‘Adult’ vertical gaining an 8% share, jumping to 37%. Obviously this had an impact on other verticals especially ‘Entertainment & Games’ that dropped from just over 50% last month to 43% this month.

Apart from those two there were not to many other surprises apart from a jump in the ‘Internet & Technology’ vertical now owning just under 13% of the network. This rise can be attributed to the promotion we have undertaken in the last month aimed at “bloggers” and the release of our Affiliate Program enhancements.

In the next month or two we are anticipating further growth in the ‘Adult’ vertical once we release ePassporte as a new payment method for Publishers and Advertisers. At the moment with only PayPal and E-Bullion available, our ‘Adult’ vertical is restricted because PayPal in particular does not allow adult related transactions. Due to this, the adult industry simply doesn’t use PayPal. However the industry does use ePassporte!

The mass multiplayer online gaming industry is a competitive market with new games entering the industry each week competing for the attention of online gamers.

Pimpin® has been online since late 2004 and has established itself as a very popular role playing game with two versions, Pimpin® Down Under and Pimpin® Euro. The corner stone to their success has been from careful and selective advertising, ensuring each dollar spent gave the best return, and in this market, rewards come in the form of player signups.

AdToll gives the guys over at Pimpin® the tools to optimise their campaigns, and they are seeing some impressive results. All campaigns have been monitored using Goal Tracking, a fairly new feature allowing advertisers to track conversions for each ad campaign. This effectively helps advertisers choose which campaigns they drop, and which they choose to invest more of their dollars in. It just makes sense!

Pimpin® already had a library of proven ad media, all that was needed was a bit of experimentation and tweaking. Now, all of their campaigns return very healthy conversions for their dollar.

The table below summarises typical campaigns:

There are definitely some tricks in finding good ad placements. Scouting the directory for under performing sites works very well, and can bring some extreme short to medium term results. High ad view, low click ad groups are more than likely the result of poorly targeted ads. If you have a targeted ad for the spot, BOOK IT!

Pimpin® Down Under and Pimpin® Euro also appear in the directory offering text, banner and video ads, so please check them out!

I must say it’s surreal to think that we launched AdToll 6 months ago! Time really does fly, especially when you work so hard… and yes ok I’ll admit we have had some fun along the way.

It was only in September 2006 that we actually decided to build our own network. After years of using other similar services we became frustrated with the “lack of service” and the results. The concept behind AdToll was to build a platform with not only exceptional service, but one which could quickly adapt to market trends and provide our customers with a solid range of tools, reporting and performance they demanded.

Now, 6 months on, I can truly say we are very happy with the progress we have made. The online advertising industry is probably one of the hardest markets to crack with it being dominated by big players such as Google. On top of that, a lot of webmasters are weary of new services assuming they are scams or no good. Part of our marketing effort over the last 6 months has been educating would-be customers that we are trustworthy and we are serious about what we do.

I’d like to take the time to thank everyone who has supported us in any way. I have personally been surprised with the extremes some people go to like for example Nick who started a forum dedicated to AdToll. You can find it at www.adtollforums.com. That’s just one example; there has been many more, so thank you to everyone.

I’d like to look back over the last 6 months and point out some of the hi-lights:

Those would be the main standout events that we have experienced, not including our short period of downtime. Let’s face it, why would we want to mention it! In saying that though we did bounce back very well after that nightmare and landed on our feet very well. The most important thing though is that we were able to learn some valuable lessons from the experience.

Lets us take a look at the progress of AdToll from a traffic perspective using the very controversial Alexa rank! Below you will see the daily traffic rank trend for AdToll for the last 6 months exactly.

Yes I know a lot of people hate the Alexa rank… maybe it’s because they don’t have a good one, I don’t know (apart from the fact it is flawed). Lets face it though, love it or hate it, the Alexa rank is here to stay, it’s not going anywhere and as long as it is here people will continue to use it to evaluate the performance of a website.

Or put another way, the Alexa rank is like Paris Hilton… in public everyone hates it but behind closed doors we all love it, that’s the truth!

Now looking at the Alexa rank for AdToll.com over the last 6 months you can see it has had it’s usual troughs and peaks but over all the trend is upwards and that itself is a great sign. At the time of writing this blog entry our 3 month average was 24,069 and yesterdays Alexa rank was 12,687.

Let us now compare our Alexa rank to those of our bigger competitors, Adengage and Adbrite:

Now look I am not stupid nor unrealistic, but that graph is quite interesting. Perhaps it means nothing and maybe it’s just me… but do I see that when we launched, Adengage and Adbrite’s Alexa ranks both started falling? Like I said maybe it’s nothing and maybe I am reading more into it than what there is but deep down we like to think we had something to do with that! *wink* *wink*

Again I would like to thank everyone, but in particular our Publishers and Advertisers for giving us a go and for standing by us. We promise to continue our exceptional customer service, platform improvements and keep you doing the most important thing… making money!

So what plans do we have for the next 6 months? Well there’s lots in the pipeline let me tell you, so to keep up to date subscribe to our blog!

For those of you that know our platform well you will know we are very “click” oriented and all the information that is provided for you is focused on clicks.

There are however a lot of cases where clicks aren’t everything! Some advertisers for example are looking for good branding opportunities where their ad is going to get a lot of views; where clicks are not their main focus.

In the past it hasn’t been easy to find these “high view” advertising opportunities without visiting each site’s rate card individually. As you would imagine this would be very time consuming and let’s face it, no one would ever do it.

We have solved this problem though by providing some new information in the Site Directory. We have added a new column of data (Avg. Views/Ad/Week) which Advertisers can sort by.

This allows Advertisers to easily identify advertising opportunities based on ad views, rather than clicks.

We have also noticed it is very useful for finding undervalued advertising opportunities where clicks might be low but views very high. In these situations you will find that with the right targeted ad, you will achieve a really good result.

This change has been in place for a couple of days and already we have had some good feedback from advertisers. We have also seen an increase in ad bookings on sites that were perhaps struggling a little before simply due to the fact that they were not attracting a lot of clicks.

Check it out for yourself and browse the AdToll Site Directory - http://www.adtoll.com/directory

Games Advertbox is a banner exchange dedicated to online games. The network provides qualified traffic and has excellent conversion rates for targeted ads.

The exchange offers a 1:1 ratio of impressions and is free to use. Games Advertbox maintains a quality network by view/visit monitoring and ensuring ads are placed within the top 600 pixels of its sites in the prime viewing real estate.

Advertisers can now purchase directly on this network through AdToll for very reasonable prices. Recommended games niches include Mass Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG), action games, pet games, sports games, strategy games and arcade games.

Games Advertbox is a Premium Publisher and advertising opportunities should seriously be considered by Advertisers. Check out the Rate Card at http://www.adtoll.com/rate-card-for-games-advertbox-125/

Until now we only offered payment via PayPal but due to demand we are working on expanding on the available payment options.

In saying that, we have just released the ability for our Advertisers to deposit funds from their E-Bullion account.

Obviously we will only be accepting payments of e-Currency®, not gold or silver.

Rate Cards are a tool for Advertisers to learn about the particular site and browse the different advertising options available. The statistics on the Rate Cards should be used as an indication only as they are based on the previous performance of the site.

Statistics on the Rate Card is calculated using an average of the data collected over the past 7 days, which helps smooth out daily variations to give a better indication of the sites performance.

A very important consideration Advertisers must make and understand, is that the statistics of each available advertising option are representative of the next ad booked in that spot. It is displayed in this way to inform Advertisers of the performance their ad may achieve if they made a booking.

As an example:

A Publisher has a standard banner Ad Group with Ad Pool size set to 10 ( so there are 10 available spots in the rotation). The Ad Group is currently being served 2 Sponsored Ads and 5 Run of Network Ads. Therefore, the number of ads currently in rotation is 7.

In the course of the day the Ad Group receives 100 clicks from 15,000 views.

At the end of the day, the data is complied and statistics calculated, as follows

Average clicks/ad/week

7 times the total number of clicks received during the day (to give total clicks in a week), divided by 8 (the position of the next ad booking). This equals 87.5 (or 88 clicks/ad/week).

Average views/ad/week

7 times the total number of views received during the day (to give total views in a week), divided by 8 (the position of the next ad booking). This equals 13,125 views/ad/week.

The Rate Card is then updated to show the average of the last 7 days of data.

To make things easy, let’s say the daily statistics were the same each day, for the last 7 days. The Rate Card would then display:

Average clicks/ad/week: 88 clicks

Average views/ad/week: 13,125 views

Average CTR: 0.7%

When an Advertiser views the Rate Card, this information gives them a good indication of the performance their ad may achieve if they made a booking. Of course, performance will vary depending on targeting, media used etc. This is why Rate Cards are only an indication. Your Account Manager can help you optimise your campaign to get the best results.

In summary,

• Rate Cards are a tool and are to be used as an indication only.
• Statistics shown are for the next ad booking, NOT for the entire rotation of ads in the group.
• You Account Manager can help you optimise your campaign.