If you don’t know your stats, you are loosing money. Every person I talk to who doesn’t know their traffic stats, click through rates, conversation rates and rebill rates is loosing money. They probably think they are doing pretty well, but without being able to examine their statistics to see trends, popularity, and to be able to test ideas they aren’t making the optimal amount.

I know mine pretty well, and I know them well enough to be able to predict the outcome with changes, in traffic volume, search engine rank movement, or adjustments in banner placement on the site. I saw a direct drop in traffic after redirecting my Google search traffic from the mobile site to a similar desktop site, Google toolbar users are constantly feeding back data to Google and they know how long visitors are at a site, and this can affect your actual ranking. Because mobile devices can’t yet have toolbars thank the lord, Google can’t collect this data from mobile users and is forced to rely on what their desktop users are doing.

Now, you are probably thinking I’m going to talk about Google Analytics or other web stats programs. Not today, today is going to be about Banner and Advertising Statistics.

If you have made the mistake of hard coding in ads directly into your site, please read this post and immediatly go fix it. Using a good ad rotator will allow you to “test, test, test” (Shoemoney quote). People get banner blindness, and if you have the same footer ad on EVERY page, people won’t even notice it after scrolling through the first 4 pages of your mobile tube site, yes spankwire I’m talking about your ZZ ad. Banner rotation has 2 huge advantages, you can try multiple banners without editing your code, and you can start and stop banner which aren’t performing well or leading to sales.

These are very rough numbers, some factual, some guesses, but want to show the importance of using a banner rotation script on all ads.

Spankwire.com has a estimated daily traffic of 1.5 Million visitors per day to their primary site, according to both compete and quantcast.com. With an estimated 10% of traffic being mobile, lets say their mobile site gets 200,000 visitors per DAY. With the average number of page views for a tube site around 6, we can estimate that banner has an impression rate of 1.2 million. Based upon testing of the same banner on a mobile property of my own, I know the click through rate of that banner is around .05%, which means about 7500 clicks per day. Using numbers provided by Brazzers affiliate program, which show an expected conversion rate of about 1:800 on average would mean a conversion rate of ~9 per day. At the standard price of $25.00 per day generates an income of $225.00. Now lets see what happens if we change the banner. I have tried a different banner and found the click through rate to be around .09%.

Looking at the same numbers for spankwire we can see a noticable profit increase by changing banners. 1.2 Million impressions at .09% would be 13,500 clicks and 16 sales translating to $420.00 a difference of $195.00 additional profit by changing a banner. Who wouldn’t want to be making an extra $195 a day by just changing a banner ad?

Now for the How

There are a few ways to handle this. The advantage we have is that mobile devices doesn’t really support flash so we can safely say most ads will be static images or iframes. If we stick with the static image example it is pretty easy to dump banner impressions and clicks into a database table and perform some queries to generate reports. This maybe ok for a low volume site, but doesn’t allow any control over which ads are show when and to whom. When I started my mobile site, I just had a array of banners and shuffled them in php and printed out the first banner, it worked but provided no stats.

Every site now is served by a local install of OpenX. Probably my top 3 used php opensource projects right behind wordpress and mediawiki. You can download it from http://www.openx.org/. There is also a hosted solution, but I don’t want to add the extra overhead to the mobile browsers, it is easier to serve everything from a single domain for faster page loads and cuts down on the javascript. I currently use the local php method, which write the banner codes right into php, so less worries of javascript errors or conflicts.

Taken from the OpenX Terms of Service 4.2.

Prohibited Content. Company Web Site shall comply with all applicable Laws during the Term. Company shall not use the OpenX Hosted Service to: (a) upload or otherwise transmit any Advertisements that are unlawful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive of another’s privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable; (b) harm minors in any way; (c) impersonate any person or entity; (d) forge headers or otherwise manipulate identifiers in order to disguise the origin of any Advertisement transmitted through the OpenX Hosted Service; (e) upload or otherwise transmit any Advertisement that Company does not have a right to transmit under any law or under contractual relationships (such as inside information, proprietary and confidential information learned or disclosed as part of employment relationships or under nondisclosure agreements); (f) upload or otherwise transmit any Advertisement that infringes or misappropriates any Intellectual Property Right or other proprietary rights of any person; (g) upload or otherwise transmit any material that contains software viruses or any other computer code, files or programs designed to interrupt, destroy or limit the functionality of any computer software or hardware or telecommunications equipment; (h) interfere with or disrupt the OpenX Hosted Service, OpenX Demand Service, OpenX Supply Service or the OpenX Market or networks connected to the OpenX Hosted Service; or (i) violate any applicable Law. OpenX shall not be responsible or liable for the deletion, correction, destruction, damage, loss or failure to store any Advertisements or other materials submitted by Company to the OpenX Hosted Service. OpenX reserves the right to withhold, or remove Advertisements from the OpenX Hosted Service without notice for any breach of this Agreement.

You can decide if that applies to the content you may want them to serve as part of your banners. I recommend using the hosted solution, to avoid having to agree to additional terms of service, but if you want to have assitance or high level of assurance go with the hosted package.

They have gone through a few major versions of the software over the past few years. They started out as phpads, went to openads, and not sure why recently jumpted to openx. I’m sure they probably have a blog post about it but not important.

The other option for hosted banners is Google, who’s team of lawyers has come up with this lovely fine print:

Site Content

While Google offers broad access to a variety of content in the search index, publishers using the Ad Manager service may only do so on sites that adhere to our content guidelines, unless authorized to do otherwise by Google.

Ad Manager may not be used to display ads on pages with the following types of content:

• Violence
• Advocacy against any protected group (e.g., racial or ethnic origin, sexual orientation/gender identity, age, disability, sex, religion, color, national origin, or veteran status)
• Pornography, pedophilia, incest, bestiality or child pornography
• Illicit drugs and drug paraphernalia
• Online casinos and gambling
• Hacking/cracking content
• Sales of weapons or ammunition (e.g., firearms, fighting knives, stun guns)
• Sales of hard alcohol
• Sales tobacco or tobacco-related products
• Sales of prescription drugs
• Sales of products that are replicas or imitations of designer goods
• Sales or distribution of term papers or student essays
• Deceptive or manipulative content or construction to improve your site’s search engine ranking as outlined in the webmaster quality guidelines posted at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html.
• Content protected by copyright law unless a publisher has the necessary legal rights to display that content. Please see our DMCA policy for more information.
• Any other content that is illegal, promotes illegal activity, or infringes on the legal rights of others

Pretty sure they make it clear, they don’t want to be used to serve porn. But if you are reading this and not doing porn, feel free to check them out here: https://www.google.com/admanager/login/en_US/index.html

I do need to wrap this up, and get back to real work but wanted to add a little bit more.

OpenX is confusing

I have been lucky enough to watch openx grow up and mature over the past few major versions. It has come a long way, but I think the hardest part is getting started. Even having done it a few times, still takes me a few minutes to decide how to layout the names of advertisers, banners, campaigns, websites, zones, etc. They have gotten better, and is much easier to edit mistakes and typos, but there are somethings that once set are a pain to reverse. The temptation is to just make 1 site, and use the same invocation code on every site, and use the same advertiser for every company. This laziness will come back and haunt you once you learn the system and start working with reports and stats. The extra time spent in the beginning will be worth it over time.