One of the most common questions we get at our customer service address goes something like this:

“Hi! I like your service, but I’ve noticed that many bidders cancel bids before they expire. Does that mean they’re ripping me off, because they don’t have to pay when they cancel a bid?”

The short answer is “No, as a publisher you earn money every second a bid is displayed on your site“. And as an advertiser, you’re charged every second your bid is the high bidder. These charges happen every few seconds and are credited (or charged) to your account automatically.

The longer answer is that, although we discuss advertising in terms of cost per day (ie: how much it costs to have your ad on a site for an entire day), bids don’t have to last a full day. We actually charge bidders every few seconds to the nearest 1/100th of a second, so there’s no way anyone can gain anything by cancelling a bid: it just prevents future charges.

For example, if someone bids your ad box up to $24 a day and sits there for an hour before cancelling, then we will charge them $1.00. On our site, the values we show are rounded to the nearest cent, but if you hold your mouse over the “current profits” number (if you’re a publisher) or the “current expense” number (if you’re an advertiser), you’ll see the a less-rounded version.

As most of you know, we do allow bidders (and publishers) to cancel any bid at any time. Often bidders will try out a site for a bit to see the performance. When a bid is cancelled, there’s no way anyone is gaming the system or not paying anything - they still have to pay for the time they were up. In addition, our campaign system will sometimes cancel bids as it manages the campaign: that’s probably where most of these cancelled bids are coming from!

But I’m not just posting this to clear this issue up. Over the past few weeks, we’ve made changes to the site to try to make this more clear to our members, but nevertheless, this question still arrives in our in box once in a while. Much less frequently, granted, but still enough for it to be noticable! I think it’s time to admit that maybe the word “cancelled” wasn’t the right choice: it has connotations of “undo” to it, a sense of “oh, wait, wait, I take this back”.

We’re considering renaming the “cancelled” status to something a bit more clear: “Expired early” is our current favourite, but we’re open to alternatives! If you have any suggestions, feel free to post them in the comments, with our thanks. And you can expect to see the current naming of the “cancelled” status to be “expired early” in the near future.

Whoah, it’s been a while since the last post!  My apologies.

We’ve got a few new features up: new interactive charts and chart types, as well as an upgrade to our ad code.

The charts you’ve probably noticed: they’re what’s shown when you’re examining the performance of an ad box (or a bid, or an ad, or a campaign!).  They used to be static images - and still are, if you don’t have Flash installed - but if you do, they’ve been replaced with more interactive charts that let you get exact values for every data point.  Neat!

We’ve also added comparative charts, which let you plot the performance of, say, three bids on the same charts, so you can see at a glance how they’re performaning against each other. We’ve set up a page here, which walks you through how these new charts work. Enjoy!

The second new feature is a revamped version of our copy-and-paste code. This new code is simpler to install, but otherwise has all the same features. You can get it by going to “My ad boxes” and clicking on “Get code”. You don’t have to upgrade if you don’t want to, of course!

Why did we change our code? There’s a few reasons. The main one was that some platforms (Blogger and Wordpress, specifically) would try to get too helpful and would accidentally modify our code so that it wouldn’t work. This was not so good! Our new code is more compact and simpler, which means that it takes up less space on your website, and there’s less places where it can be modified. It’s also prettier to look at.

The new code also gives you the option of whether or not you want your ads to display to people who have disabled JavaScript: having it on means more people seeing your ad, but also larger code on your page. Most other networks don’t offer non-JavaScript ad displays, but we recommend it!

So that’s what’s new! Expect to see more frequent posts here in the future, and thanks for being a member of Project Wonderful.

This is neat. Over at Mashable.com I just came across this selection of advertisement friendly Wordpress Themes. check them out.

This tip is aimed primarily at our advertisers. Short version: by leaving standing bids on sites at below the market rate, you can get exposure on sites that you might not normally be able (or willing) to pay for.

One of the tenets of the Efficient Market Hypothesis is that the current prices of goods in a marketplace already reflects all of the information about their value. In other words, unless you know something no one else knows, you can’t consistently outperform the market.

At this stage in our lifecycle, the prices on Project Wonderful are probably not perfectly efficient, meaning that there are plenty of opportunities for eagle-eyed advertisers to get higher than average value for their advertising. Hindsight being 20/20 you can see this in our market information by comparing the movement of prices to the traffic that a site gets. A lot of our publishers are comics artists who publish 3-5 times a week. When you look at their traffic you can see the clear pattern as traffic grows on weekdays and drops on weekends. Often the prices do not match that same pattern, which is odd. If one of six buttons on a site with 50,000 visitors is worth, say $1.50 on one day, you’d expect that button to be worth the same amount on any other day with similar traffic.

Below is a portion of a sample chart from one of our members. I’ve superimposed the traffic stats with the movement of prices. You can see that generally speaking they move up and down in relation to one another, but that from time to time, they diverge. Pay particular attention to the area I highlighted in blue. People advertising on the 21st were paying just over half what you’d expect to pay on a weekday.

Why is this happening? There could be a number of reasons but one of them I suspect is that people aren’t making use of the features we provide to help you catch these moments. For the enterprising advertiser looking to capitalize on opportunities like this, we offer two approaches.

First, you can use the notification system and set up a search that will notify you when an ad box falls into your price range. For example, ads on the blog are going for $0.04 right now. If you ran a search for “sites with a URL like: blogjectwonderful.com” and then set the bid price at $0.01 then you’d get no results returned. But setting up a notification for that search would mean that the system would contact you if the price ever fell. Then you can log in and bid away.

For an even more automated strategy, consider leaving a standing bid on pages that you’d love to sneak on to from time to time. What this means is putting up a bid far below market price which you suspect the box might fall to from time to time. Then set it for some longer period of time (say a month) and let it go. Whenever the price dips, the system will start bidding for you and displaying your ad. When prices climb again, you’re no longer charged. In this way, you can take advantages of gaps in the marketplace where prices don’t match the full value of exposure on the site.

Happy bidding!

-Tim

I was reading this article on Wired about Google’s recent drop in share price which is probably due to new data showing that click-through growth is slowing down for Google’s ads. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there about what this might mean (Google talks about generating less click-throughs due to changes that should hopefully increase the quality of those clicks) but one line in particular jumped out at me.

“It’s not clicks that advertisers are really buying, it’s what those clicks get them, which is sales conversions,” said Sanderson.

This is something that we talk about a lot here. When we decided to go with the CPD (cost-per-day) pricing scheme, our biggest worry was that potential advertisers or publishers wouldn’t get it. CPM and CPC are the default metrics used for measuring ad performance across the industry and a lot of people seem to get kind of obsessed with them. It’s understandable, they are easy metrics to grasp and very easy to measure. The risk is that in focusing on these performance metrics, you can forget that they are really only indirect measures of success.

The only metrics that really matter to an advertiser should be CPS or CPF (cost-per-sale or cost-per-fan). CPC and CPM can help you to begin that analysis (which is why we offer both of these statistics as part of our analysis tools) but unless you complete the loop by analysing how many those displays turn into successful transactions (whatever that means for you), you haven’t really learned all that much.

-Tim

We’ll be rolling out a new update on Wednesday with two major changes. First off, after you log in the welcome page will display stats about your ad boxes and bids. Secondly, we’ll be limiting you to a maximum to 20 tags for describing your site’s contents.

The welcome page change is part of the usability enhancement program that we’re developing to improve our member’s experience and make frequently used features more accessible. When you log in to your account, if you have active bids or active ad boxes, then the welcome page will change from the default “how to use the service” message to a display that gives you up to date information on performance and other stats.

Give it a try and let us know how you like it.

On the tags side of thing, we noticed that while the vast majority of our members had less than 20 tags describing their sites, there was a small minority of ad boxes that had hundreds of tags! While we get wanting to ensure maximum exposure for your site, having hundreds of tags to describe the content is functionally equivalent to having no tags at all. If you have 500 tags, then the fact that one of them says “recipes” doesn’t really give me any information about the content of your site. The consequence is a race to the bottom where advertisers end up losing trust in the tagging system and going back to checking site content by hand, which is bad for everyone.

Starting Wednesday, we will limit sites to 20 tags. If you are currently over the limit, we’ve automatically selected 20 from the list you had, though we recommend checking with our choices and readjusting them to better reflect the content of your site. We hope that this move will help clean up the tag namespace and ensure better accuracy in searches as well as encouraging our publishers to be more focused on their core topics.

-Tim

Project Wonderful will be in attendance at Experience!Tech 2008 and we’ll be exhibiting from 10:00am to 1:00pm on the 19th.

Come visit us if you’re in town.

We’ve added a new feature for our advanced members who want to use the same ad on multiple pages with different colour schemes. If you log in to your account and take a look at your ad box code, you’ll notice a few new lines of code and many lines of comments explaining how to use them.

Look for the lines: foregroundColor=''; and backgroundColor='';

If you edit these with the hexadecimal that you want for your foreground and background colours (i.e. backgroundColor='ff0000'; for a bright red), they will override the settings that you set in the ad box properties on our site.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about don’t worry! Cutting and pasting in the code that we generate will still work just fine.

-Tim

Over at the Freakonomics blog, they’ve been talking about click fraud. It began with this alarming report that 16.6% of all ad clicks are fraudulent across the industry and that in the case of Cost-per-Click advertisers like Google and Yahoo it was 28.3%. They’ve since followed it up with a post where Google explains that their algorithms are quite good and that they estimate that only 0.02% of clicks that pass through the network are fraudulent.

The challenge for the reader is to determine whether to believe the report of the “independent auditor” ClickForensics who offer third party click validation services and so have an incentive to skew high or to believe Google who, of course, have an incentive to skew low. In the end it doesn’t really matter, as long there is a mechanism to mechanically pay out money for clicks (or displays) there will be an arms race where shady publishers try to game the system.

Guys, this is exactly why we decided to stop selling advertising on these ridiculously open-to-abuse pricing models! There’s a Better Way!

-Tim

Quite a few of our users are using Wordpress to deliver their ads. We like Wordpress quite a lot (in fact we’re using it to run this blog) except for one problem: the system strips HTML comments out of the code in the templates before sending it out to the Internet.

The problem is that our robot needs to be able to see some of the information contained in those comments. This led to the robot sometimes falsely detecting a site as down when it was running fine.

The solution that we’ve been recommending to users is that if you use the text widget, the comments get translated faithfully and your ads will show up fine and be detected fine. This solution still works great if you’re happy with a column of ads on one side but it doesn’t help users who want to do something more clever with their ad placement. This has been driving us (and some of you) crazy.

The good news is that Dale over at www.swollenpickles.com has solved the problem! It involves some familiarity with editing Wordpress themes but if you’re at the level of wanting more control over your Project Wonderful ad box placements then you should be able to work it out. Here are the instructions!

-Tim