Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, you're kind of at the advertiser's mercy on how reliable they are about reporting conversions, right? I can't see how the ad network could audit conversions with certainty, unless they were also processing the payments. I would be very interested in hearing how it's done if I'm wrong, though. I suppose it's kind of the same with an affiliate program, but on an ad network with thousands of participants, it seems…
> I can't see how the ad network could audit conversions with certainty, unless they were also processing the payments. A ping script, from the ad network, on the transaction completion page is all that's needed. Pretty straight forward.
Show HN: an alternative to AdSense
21–30 of 83 posts
Re: Show HN: an alternative to AdSense
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, you're kind of at the advertiser's mercy on how reliable they are about reporting conversions, right? I can't see how the ad network could audit conversions with certainty, unless they were also processing the payments. I would be very interested in hearing how it's done if I'm wrong, though. I suppose it's kind of the same with an affiliate program, but on an ad network with thousands of participants, it seems…
> I can't see how the ad network could audit conversions with certainty, unless they were also processing the payments. A ping script, from the ad network, on the transaction completion page is all that's needed. Pretty straight forward.
Re: Show HN: an alternative to AdSense
#23If you're being paid per action, are you not then relying on the ability of the advertisers to convert your clicks?
We track the clicks and if a product shown on an advert is getting lots of clicks but zero conversions, we swap it out and show alternatives instead.
So we try to make sure that only stuff that will convert is shown.
Re: Show HN: an alternative to AdSense
#24Problems we ran into included: trying to normalize the product data from the vendors into a format usable to make actionable and accurate ads--the aggregators practiced very little data hygiene and did not enforce much consistency, oddly, some vendors couldn't even spell the names of their products correctly which made for some pretty crappy looking ads; at one point we had over 4 million products listed, primarily because we started importing Amazon products and vendors, so the product selection was difficult, some things have general appeal and would show up all the time and others wouldn't match much content at all; we had trouble signing up sites to display the ads, CPA was relatively new at the time for the scale we were going for, we might have been better off selling our tech to the top affiliate aggregators as a better, easier method for sites to integrate affiliate program membership; reporting was a real bitch because of the delay from click through to actual purchase to the payment showing up, which depending on the affiliate program could be upwards of 90 days.
In retrospect, we would have better off setting it up for passive income and not try to do active sales to integrator websites and instead shored up the pitch copy and made it largely self service for the integrators (it mostly was already, but I spent a lot of time tweaking the matching algorithm rather than on the sales/pitch side), and pitched it as an easier way to join affiliate networks. That would have set expectations a little better than calling it an "ad network" like AdSense, which we also considered our main competitor.
Re: Show HN: an alternative to AdSense
#25Congrats on launching this. You've picked quite a battle and quite a market to get into but hope it all goes well.
Thanks, it's not going to be easy but I think our matching is brilliant and we have a fantastic team :)
Re: Show HN: an alternative to AdSense
#26Hey HN, We've been working on EmberAds for a few months now and I think we are ready to get HN using it, The idea is you paste two lines of code, we match to your content and show ads. We've over 10,000 retailers in our system and work mostly in the UK + US (other countries are coming soon). Instead of being paid per click like adsense, you get paid per action (such as a signup or purchase) we've found this works bet…
Over 10,000?
Re: Show HN: an alternative to AdSense
#27Hey HN, We've been working on EmberAds for a few months now and I think we are ready to get HN using it, The idea is you paste two lines of code, we match to your content and show ads. We've over 10,000 retailers in our system and work mostly in the UK + US (other countries are coming soon). Instead of being paid per click like adsense, you get paid per action (such as a signup or purchase) we've found this works bet…
I applaud you for taking on this industry though paying on an action is more beneficial to the majority of advertisers than the majority of advertisers, and the advertisers are the side you don't have yet.
Re: Show HN: an alternative to AdSense
#28Re: Show HN: an alternative to AdSense
#29A friend and I built a similar service back in 2006-2007. It was actually a rev share program based on affiliate aggregators like LinkShare and Commission Junction -- that's how we populated our product list. A quick look at some of the sample vendors mentioned and the affiliate programs they use, I suspect you are doing something similar. Problems we ran into included: trying to normalize the product data from the v…
We are currently talking to some of the networks and affiliates about using our technology directly as well, as they seem to like our matching
Re: Show HN: an alternative to AdSense
#30Hey HN, We've been working on EmberAds for a few months now and I think we are ready to get HN using it, The idea is you paste two lines of code, we match to your content and show ads. We've over 10,000 retailers in our system and work mostly in the UK + US (other countries are coming soon). Instead of being paid per click like adsense, you get paid per action (such as a signup or purchase) we've found this works bet…
> We've over 10,00 Over 10,000?