Performancing Partners

I'm always in favor of competition, and have looked at various ad placement programs to compete with Google. So far I haven't found one I've liked enough to keep, but Performancing Partners may finally offer a worthwhile program.

The basic concept is that advertisers can choose specific sites to run their ads on. Google offers that too, but Performancing Partners lets me set my own price for ads and lets me reject unsuitable advertisers BEFORE their ads appear here. I like that.

I also like that they pay by PayPal. Google will make direct bank transfers, but it's a lot easier to use PayPal - I get notified when money arrives rather than having to check my bank on-line.

The split is 70-30, with 70% going to the web site. Advertisers can choose CPM or CTR rates. This is a little confusing right now, because I don't see any way for a publisher to set anything but a CPM price.

Pay attention when setting that price. They are going to give you a suggested price based on the traffic you get. However, when you first sign up, their estimate of your traffic is likely to be way off on the low side - consequently they'll suggest a very low price for ads. I suggest looking at http://performancing.com/partners/advertisers/blogs/ to see what other publishers similar to you (in content and popularity) are charging. That's probably a much larger figure.

The ads are not contextual, so can be mixed in with Google Adsense. That's another point in their favor. You choose the category of your site from fairly short list - I figured "Technology" was close enough for this site, but would like to see "Computer Support" or something like that instead..

Right now it's all beta and no ads are running, but they say it will be up and running any day now. It requires a snippet of Javascript on each page you want to run these on. Each ad will be 125 pixels square, and you can display up to six.

Probably because it is beta, the reports section seems confused right now. After an hour of running, http://performancing.com/partners/publishers/blogs/list told me that there had been 6,540 impressions. I get about that many page views DAILY, so that couldn't be right. Under http://performancing.com/partners/publishers/reports it had a more reasonable 481 impressions.. that looks more like reality..

Turns out that was just trying to estimate monthly impressions. Eventually it settled down to a more accurate figure. It also assigned an "autoprice" for my ads of $278.00 a month. I reduced that to $200.00 (about $1.00 CPM) to be a little more competitive.

Overall, this might be worth adding to your blog or website. The proof of the pudding will be how many advertisers they actually attract.

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Thu Oct 26 19:49:05 2006:   TonyLawrence


At this point, I think this is a bit of an (perhaps unintentional) scam.

Right now there are apparently no advertisers - or if there are any, it's folks looking for extreme bargains caused by publishers mis-pricing their blogs.

So, if you have their code on your site, they run a "house ad" pointing back to themselves. Great for them, doesn't help you any... and in the meantime, I've got valuable web real estate tied up doing nothing but giving free ads for Performancing Partners.

Since all they REALLY need right now is a hit counter so that they can accurately track stats, that house ad is truly a gift from me to them.. effectively it's free advertising for them at my expense - yes, I could potentially get referrals from it, but heck, I could get referral money from lots of things I culd run in that space - I'd rather run ads there, thanks anyway.

I'm not accusing them of deliberate chicanery: I think they WANT advertisers and may even get some someday. But right now, running their code gives THEM free publicity and does nothing for me.

By the way, they "helpfully" removed me from their system and told me to remove their code after I posted the above opinion in their forum.. rather telling response, I think.

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