I’ve always been a fan of smaller self serve networks anytime we need to test a large number of campaigns or landing pages for an advertiser. In many cases you can test and analyze 1,000 visits for around $50.00 – cheap insight into page performance.
Once you figure out the pages and graphics that perform the best you can move on to higher cost / higher quality advertising networks like Google Adwords.
Adbrite has been a good source of test traffic for us for several years. Their performance and interface are some of the worst in the industry, so we limit our spend here. It’s been surprising to see Adbrite’s performance increase a huge amount over the past 12 months. To effect changes like this, they must have fired everyone.
A huge pitfall of Adbrite’s network is you can’t approve publishing zones before they start sending you traffic. Everyday I have pause ads on 10-15 new publisher websites that are sending fake or bot traffic. I guess Adbrite just doesn’t monitor the bot traffic. We’ve never been re-reimbursed for it.
Fraud? In many cases Adbrite publisher sites will have 300-500 banner views and send 150-200 clicks. If you’re bidding 20 cents that’s $38.00 down the drain. For this reason you can’t set a 1000.00/day budget on Adbrite and walk away from it. I check these sites out personally and there is no possible way to have a 50% CTR (click-thru rate) with legitimate visitors.
Is it worth it to have to log in everyday to pause 400-600 Adbrite publishers each month? Not really. Even after pausing the obvious fraud publishers you’re still left with 100s or 1000s of other sites you can’t exactly be sure of.
We’ve learned to preserve margins by developing sophisticated robots that continually inspect the Adbrite publisher zones our ads are running in. We then do automated media buys based on performance, content and user demographics. Even with these tools Adbrite’s poor performance prevents any epic ad spend scaling. When is the last time you’ve heard of anyone blowing an offer out on Adbrite?
Because of the recent progress I still hold out some hope for Adbrite (err, i’m an eternal optimist). I really hope these guys get it together. Please share your Adbrite reviews and experiences in the comments.
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