I think every affiliate marketer has come to Adbrite and been really excited at the possibilities. “You mean I can get a flat rate 1 week text ad for $1,750 that will bring me 28,000 clicks?!?! With the 5% conversion rate on my landing page that will be 1,400 conversions and at $15 a conversion that’s $19,250 pure profit!! Woohoo, I’m gonna be rich!” Unfortunately it doesn’t work out that way. You have many strikes working against you with these ads.
- First of all, from our testing experience you usually get a fraction of their estimated clicks. I’m not sure where they are getting their figures, but the estimates are way off.
- The traffic is largely international, even when it says US. If you have any kind of geo tracking on your landing page you will see this. So if your offer is geo-restricted, much of your traffic will be lost or redirected.
- This advertising is contextual, which most affiliate marketers tend to avoid. You can’t apply your known conversions ratios from a search campaign, to a contextual campaign. Search traffic by definition converts more because people are actually searching for your keywords. They have put effort into the search, and are ready to convert. But, people simply browsing a site who happen to see you text ad probably aren’t too motivated to convert your desired action.
Of course, as with everything in affiliate marketing, you should always test it yourself to see what works and what doesn’t. Adrite’s flat rate ads may work for some purposes, like to increase brand awareness. But for the cut-throat world of driving traffic to CPA type offers we have found Adbrite ineffective.
In defense of Adbrite, estimated clicks are from a good campaign. You are paying for impressions, not clicks which means your ad copy alone determines how many clicks you will receive. The best approach is to run a pre-tested ad before placing a large, expensive order.
International traffic is a big problem, but you can geotarget with network-wide purchases.
There is nothing wrong with contextual traffic, as long as the ad copy, offer, and bid are in alignment with it.
I have had little success with Adbrite lately, but last year did modestly well. I suspect one contributor here is because the offers that work well with Adbrite’s publishers are saturated, combined with volumes of new advertisers over paying for traffic.
Good points Andrew.
I was mostly talking about the flat rate ads, not the network stuff, so you can’t geotarget on those. You just have to go along with where they say the traffic originates, which I have found to be innacurate.
Agreed, there’s nothing wrong with contextual, I do a lot of it with good results. But I think people mistakenly try to apply search based numbers to contextual campaigns, and it’s a whole different animal.
Of course the advertiser is going to bump up his own stats. You are right to say that people should test and re-test before jumping in the deep end.