I’m always looking for good sources of traffic outside of Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Facebook. Traffic can make or break an affiliate campaign I am always testing new sources. This past month I tested Quigo’s AdSonar platform (owned by AOL) to see how it performed and have mixed feelings on this platform.
What is Quigo’s AdSonar?
AdSonar is a content-targeted advertising network of many large sites including AOL, ESPN, ABC News, Fox News, People, Time, CNN, NBA.com, and more. Like other PPC networks, it is an auction like system which you bid for placement, and the higher your CTR (click through rate), the lower your cost is. I saw prices typically ranging from $0.25 – $3.00 per click.
What I thought?
To be honest, I don’t like their interface very much. It is pretty slow and reminded me somewhat of the MySpace ads system in that it was complicated to do anything. I did notice they redesigned the home page recently when you login to make things a little more visually appealing.
Creating a campaign isn’t to difficult and they give you a lot of options to target your ads such as geo targeting, day parting, monthly or daily budgets, as well as let you pick which sites and sections of sites you want your ad to show on. You set your placements either by category or specific sites.
One of the things that I didn’t like was that once you create an ad, it takes awhile for it to get approved. Maybe I’m just used to Yahoo and Google who generally approve ads quickly, but waiting 2 or 3 days for your ads to be approved is like a kid waiting for Christmas to come. If the ad doesn’t work out or you want to try slightly different text, you have to wait a couple more days for that to be approved. I’m sure if you were doing tons of volume they might hook you up with an account rep that can get yours ads approved quickly, but I sure didn’t spend enough to find out.
My first test campaign, I spent about $100 and had a ROI of 29%. This wasn’t to bad as generally I’m happy if I break even when launching a new campaign. This gives me plenty of room to tweak my ads and landing pages and increase my ROI drastically. While $100 to test isn’t that much and I plan on doing a lot more testing, it gave me hope that Quigo AdSonar might be a decent source for traffic.
One thing I did notice was that the majority of the competition advertising on the network were flog sites (fake blogs). What this tells me is that I’m sure many affiliates are doing pretty well advertising there. I however don’t create flogs and don’t plan on it as I ethically don’t think it is right. This means I need to be creative when creating landing pages to advertise through Quigo AdSonar.
Overall, I will continue to do more testing and stick with this ad network for awhile. I can see past their weak sauce interface and see that there is value in there traffic.
Have you used them? What are your thoughts?
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I have tried AdSonar a few times in the past with varying success. About half the campaigns I have set up have made money, about half have lost. The ones that made money didn’t make enough for me to really put much time into it.
I have always been amazed that the same ads (mostly amazed at a teeth whitener ad and the “Kobe’s IQ is…) have been running on ESPN.com through their system for a long time so I am assuming they must be profitable. Are ESPN.com users really that dumb?