Review of Few Pay Per Click Tools

Pay Per Click is an advertising program in which ads are placed on your blog and you are paid whenever your visitors click on the ads.  It is the most common method bloggers use to make money online.  It involves almost no effort and is so incredibly easy that many blogs have too much advertising on them.   Money is maximized as traffic levels increase.

Let’s start with the greatest and the biggest of all (Adsense)

Adsense

Google AdSense is a great CPC program that lets regular webmaster joes like levik and I tap into the revenue that Google collects from displaying its sponsored links. You display the Google sponsored links on your site and for that, Google AdSense will pay you for every clickthrough. Rates vary depending on your website’s content and the price-per-click of campaigns that Google will serve on your site, but generally, their eCPM is comparable to Tier 1 ad-networks, albeit more volatile. AdSense will mail you a check everytime you reach at least $100 in your account.

The beautiful part is that Google will serve you the targeted links — links that are usually relevant to your site’s content. It can lead to more revenue for you, but it can also mean that you will be sometimes displaying the link ads of your competitors. However, AdSense has a nifty URL filter tool that takes care of that problem — you can enter up to 200 competitor URLs into the URL filter and AdSense will not serve them on your site.

AdSense arranges the sponsored links in many available ad formats — 468×60 Banner, 120×600 Skyscraper, 728×90 Leaderboard, a number of rectangle sizes (including the popular 300×250 medium rectangle) and a 125×125 “button”. Depending on which size you pick, Google will show from one to five ads inside the creative unit. You get to fully customize the appearance of the ads above — AdSense created an easy to use customization tool that already has about 25 canned color palletes and lets you create and save your own.

Depending on your target audience you may benefit from either making the ads blend in with your overall site design, or making them stand out. Because this is a strictly CPC program you will want to make sure people can see and click the ads, so placing them at the very bottom of the pages will not yield good results – these units do the best embedded right in the middle of the content.

Some time ago, Google introduced image ads for the more popular media sizes as well. These get served one per ad unit, and can be opted out of. Other revenue-generated formats that are a part of Google AdSense are: a simple link unit and AdSense for search. A link unit consists of a few related links, no descriptions. Clicking on a link in a unit takes a visitor to a page of related ads. AdSense for search is basically an embedded Google search field – webmasters earn money from users clicking on sponsored links on the results page.

Their reporting system is beautiful: you can create up to 200 “channels” for every ad or for every page that Google AdSense ads run on. On the admin portal itself, you can create one-click custom reports or choose from an array of canned reports already available.

Unfortunately, you still have no control over what campaigns are served to your visitors and cannot see the price-per-click-per-campaign report. But hey – this disadvantage is greatly outweighed by the ad network’s benefits described above. Since its inception, AdSense’s format has been copied by other ad networks, most notable of which is YPN (Yahoo!Publisher Network). However, webmasters who had a chance to test both report that AdSense’s eCPM exceeds earnings from YPN. So, until further notice – stick to AdSense.

In the application process, Google AdSense has been known to discriminate against sites that display excessive pop-ups. The excessiveness is judged solely by AdSense and we know of instances when webmasters got rejected simply because they displayed a pop-up or two on their sites. The lesson to be learned here is that you should remove pop-ups from your site, when you submit your application to join Google AdSense. Don’t worry, you can reinstate them – after you get accepted.

Chitika

Chitika offers a new, never seen before CPC (Cost Per Click) product orientated program on the advertising market aimed mainly at bloggers. With the unusual form of it’s products eMiniMalls, Related Product Units and ShopClouds,Chitika got the attentions of publishers instantly. They also offere a refferal program for their publishers for adding extra revenue to their monthly payments.Chitika was created by Venkat Kolluri (formerly of Upromise) and Alden DoRosario (formerly with Terra Lycos). The company appeared in May 2003 to become a player in the emerging industry of contextual advertising. Chitika announced the release of eMiniMalls in June of 2005.
Chitika eMiniMalls
“eMiniMalls are the industry’s first and only intelligent and interactive product merchandising service. eMiniMalls present Web publishers with a feature rich service that offers online product merchandising, a dynamic recommendation engine and robust comparative shopping information in one solution. They are a way to supplement your existing ad revenue while providing a completely new revenue stream through interactive merchandising.”

The eMiniMalls are product orientated PPC ads showing few selected products or if contextual, products related to the content of the site. The ad has a integrated search to search for more products one it gets your attention. Google AdSense publishers are reported to be safe using the eMiniMalls on pages with AdSense if the contextual option is disabled (ch_non_contextual = 1;).

Performance depends on the content of the site, the positioning, ad inventory and current biding prices. Although eMiniMalls are quite interesting and usually the PPC is very good, CTR is reported to be very low, even with high optimization on the positioning of the eMiniMalls and integration in the overal layout of the site, the CTR is much lower then AdSense.

Another thing is, clicks from countries other then USA, Canada, Mexico, United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and Finland are shown in your unaudited revenue report, but ignored in your audited earnings, which means that if you have a lot of international traffic not originating from the countries listed here, the clicks will be ignored and you will not get payed for these clicks.

Chitika allows you to create channels for easy performance tracking, but this channels are not as functional as those at Google Adsense. You can also chage the colors of the ad, customize it and set alternate URLs for your unfilled inventory.
Publisher refferal program
Chitika’s publisher refferal program rewards you for bringing new publishers to the program. You earn 10% of what the people you have reffered earn for the first 12 month. You can use text links or promotional banners to drive potential publishers from your websites.
Publisher interface review
Since it was redesigned Chitika’s publisher interface is simple, well organized and easy to use, everything is where you will expect it to be. Payment history looks nice and the process of setting up ads is quite pleasant with live previews of the final look and feel of the ads.
The only thing that I personaly did’n like is that in reports, you are unable to see the totals for the selected period, totals are estimated only from the items on the current page. I hope they will fix this soon.
Customer service
There is a good knowledge base and FAQ section available on the site answering almost all of your questions and if you ever have to write them they usually reply in 24 hours. Even though I have sent only four support questions, I can expect this to be true. The answers were informative and there was no need to ask for more info after the reply.
Payments and payment options
Chitika pays on a NET 30 terms by check or PayPal. The minimum payout amount for checks is $50 and $20 for PayPal. Checks are sent on time and they are never late with payments. The split share is 60% of the overal revenue your site generates.

Bidvertiser

For Publishers
as I have already mentioned the only thing from this company that I had tested out is the publisher program. The publisher program of this company is designed to emulate common pay per click ad revenue programs similar to Google AdSense. You make money in the same way with this program as you do AdSense if you are a publisher or advertiser for that matter.
First you log into your account, then you copy and paste the code onto your website where you want a pay per click ads from bidvertiser to appear. Once the ads are in place the system will search its database of advertisers and deliver targeted ads. At least that’s the way it is supposed to work.

About a year ago one of my websites was banned from AdSense. I wanted to find something that was similar to AdSense as the niche for this website did not have very good or suitable affiliate programs. This is why I went with a similar pay per click model. With this website I was making about $150 per month from AdSense clicks.

After implementing their on my website in exactly the same way as I AdSense I had some telling results. I went from making 150 per month from Google’s pay per click system to making five dollars per month with the bidvertiser system. One thing I want to state and stress in this bidvertiser review is how nonprofitable their system is for publishers.

So if you are wondering how to make money with bidvertiser I would definitely not look at this aspect of their website.I can safely say that their publisher program is very poor and you aren’t very little from clicks. This is not to mention that the ads were completely irrelevant at times and I very seldom saw an ad that I thought was completely relevant to my site content.

For Advertisers
as I have already mentioned I have not tried their advertiser program. My guess is there advertising program is very probable considering how unprofitable their publisher program this. The advertisers that were paying for clicks on my website were getting several clicks per month and only paying about 1 to 2 since for clicks. That is literally about a penny per click for targeted traffic.

So as for the advertiser program I would recommend this as you will be able to get lots of traffic for a very cheap price. Publishers really get screwed with this company and advertisers really profit. For this reason I definitely recommend that you use been advertiser for your pay per click advertising as opposed to other services. This bidvertiser review should explain exactly why their system is completely geared towards their advertisers. I am surprised they have any publishers in the program and the only reason they do is because Google and so many people from their network.

For Affiliates
As for affiliates I am really not sure how much you make from their system. From what I have heard the affiliate program is pretty profitable as you get some nice bonuses for signing up publishers and some decent cash for signing up advertisers as well. However, I would definitely not recommend this to any publishers because it will severely hurt your reputation as an online expert. I would be shocked if you were to come across any smalltime publishers that made any meaningful income from bidvertiser.

Adbrite

How AdBrite Works

You place AdBrite Ad codes on your website. AdBrite Lists your website in AdBrite’s site Directory for Advertisers to target. Advertisers bid for Ad Display spot on your website and depending on the advertisers match highest paying ads are displayed to your user.

Disadvantages

• AdBrite mainly is non-contextual targeting and so CPC based ads does not work best because ads are not that relevant to the content.
• If you are new in AdBrite it takes some time before you have more and more advertisers target your sites inventory.
• They have manual and auto approval of ads but auto approval can lead to some unwanted adult ads which I have seen for myself. They probably do not have very strict set of rules to check for quality of ads.
• Manually approving so many ads can be time consuming. At least it was for me at the time of testing
• They reveal too much of traffic data in the publicly listed site directory which is not liked by many publishers like me.
• I haven’t seen good advertisers using AdBrite but  mainly those advertisers which are not acceptable in Adwords. This is my personal opinion about advertisers I saw.

Advantages

• They support full page ad which gets good eCPM and does not take up any Ad inventory.
• They Support Inline Link Ads which is again something which does not take up any space in Ad inventory.
• They have a good referral system for referring new publishers.
• Over time your earnings would go higher as you accumulate more advertisers targeting your Ad inventory.
• You can use it along with AdSense

AdBrite never worked for my tech and education site or I would say I was not quite patience enough to wait for the advertisers to build over time but when it comes to entertainment niche I have seen some of my friends have great success with AdBrite. Every site is different and so I am sure you can afford to experiment AdBrite Ads which do not take up much of an Ad space and see if it works for your site. If it does, well and good but if it doesn’t then also you do not loose anything.