Review: TextAdMarket - Part 1, Advertiser Side

Author’s note: This review was neither requested nor sponsored.

The text ad market is pretty crowded, everybody is trying to get a piece of Google’s 16 billion dollar (and growing) pie. TextAdMarket.com is a relative new comer to the text ad space, compared to some of the other  players out there, but it attempts to differentiate itself from other text ad brokers by pricing ad buys on a time basis rather than a pay per click model. This pricing model has some pros and cons which I will get to shortly.

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When you first arrive on the TextAdMarket home page visitors are given the chance either register either as an Advertiser or a Publisher. I decided to start out by looking into the advertising side of TextAdMarket. After you register you will start out at the account summary page (see gallery image 1). From the account home page you can see how many credits you’ve purchased and/or earned, credits being used to buy ads or the currency you receive for serving ads. In addition you will also see a status report list of the number of ads bought and sold.

Purchasing credits is easy, PayPal is the payment method, and straightforward, one dollar equals one credit. Once you have credits you proceed to the marketplace to find a site or sites on which to advertise (see gallery image 2.) The marketplace helps you identify the best site(s) to advertise by aggregating some important information, thumbnail image gives you an immediate visual sense of what kind of site you are evaluating, next you are given the weekly cost for placing your ad, followed by the average number of unique viewers by week, the Alexa ranking, and finally where the ad will run on the site (sitewide, single page, mult-page.)

I decided to run a text ad for Gamersmark.com a video game oriented site I run. So I wanted to target a site that was in or close to the videogame niche. One of the intial problems I ran into a was a lack of selection of sites on which to advertise. Since TextAdMarket is new they face a very typical catch-22, if they don’t have any publishers they can’t attract advertisers, and no advertisers means there is no incentive for a publisher to sacrifice ad inventory with a place holder. Some services such as adroll.com address this risk by letting publishers run AdSense if they don’t have advertisers interested in the publisher’s inventory. I selected two sites called goldfiles.com, which offered, among other things, videogame downloads and cardgamingonline.net.

The Buy Ad page (see gallery image 3) is where you can see a flash based graph of the sites traffice, page rank, Alexa rating, and pricing. On goldfiles.com an ad costs $0.16 per day, if they get 6K unique views a day this works out to an eCPM (effective Cost Per Thousand impressions) of $0.03, that is extremely cheap. I then proceeded to create my ad. Creating your add is very simple (see gallery image 4), if you’ve worked with AdWords, or MSN adCenter, or any of the other text ad services out there you will have no probelms, even with no prior ad text experience it’s very easy, just supply the Title, Text, Link Text, and Destination URL and you are ready to go. Some of the bigger services out there will use javascript to show you exactly what your ad will look like as you create it, TextAdMarket does not, nor does  it indicate the character limits for each of the four areas, this would have been nice.

One thing to be aware of if you’re new to text link advertising, if you don’t want to rely on just the click through stats of the network (and you should always be tracking your own stats) you will need to indicate in the ad’s destination URL a query string parameter so your analytics provider can differentiate between the ads driving your traffic. The destination URL for my two ads are www.gamersmark.com/?src=txtamrkt&aid=1 and www.gamersmark.com/?src=txtamrkt&aid=2 I can then search the “Top Content” section of Google Analytics to determine which ad is performing better.

Once your ads are created there will either be an approval period (2 days max) if the publisher has decided to implement one, or your ad maybe active immediately. When you log into your account you can select “My Ads Purchased” from the left navigation area and you will be take to a summary screen listing each of your ads (see gallery image 6.) The summary shows how your ad will render on the publisher site, the purchase price, the ad placement, and the number of days remaining in the buy. One issue I did notice is that my ad that is supposed to be running on cardgamingonline.net shows to be a “Site Wide” placement, meaning it should show up on every single page. I could not find the ad on any of the pages of that site, in fact, I could not find any TextAdMarket ads on the website at all. Needless to say, this is a big problem seeing as how I had to use credits to run the ad and I never would have known had I not checked myself. Under the traditional PPC method this would not be a problem since an ad that can’t be clicked on can’t deplete your budget, not so with time based buys. TextAdMarket can’t control if a publisher removes the ad block code or a server crash so in the event your ad doesn’t get displayed a refund will be issued.

Another tab on each of the Ad Summary blocks labeled Statistics lets you see graphs of your ad’s performance (see gallery image 7.) You get a nice flash based graph of the unique and total number of impressions your ad is generating along the unique and total number of clicks.

Pros, Cons, and Summary

Let’s start off with the pros. Time based purchases makes your campaign budgeting dead simple, you don’t have to worry about capping your spend or having to pay for clicks made against widely matched less targeted keywords, this is a big plus. The marketplace let’s you determine which sites you want to target as well as which you want to avoid, you won’t need to worry about your ads showing up on unrelated sites due to contextual errors. The ad inventory is pretty inexpensive, this maybe just a factor of the quality of sites in the marketplace and may change over time, but currently you can run a monthlong ad on a lot of the sites for under five dollars, if you get even a handful of clicks it was worth it. The interface is clean and easily navigable with charths showing you the important stats for your ad buys, simple and effective.

Now onto the cons, and it should be noted that some of these issues are with the publishers and not TextAdMarket itself, but there are some items that can be addressed. The biggest issue I ran into was my ad not actually running on one of the purcashed sites, some kind of quality control is needed to prevent this from happening. Another issue that I had, that could be more easily remedied and would actually allow for TextAdMarket to charge a higher rate is an indication as to whether or not your ad will go Above The Fold (will it be seen by site visitors without having to scroll down.) Since these are time based buys the publisher gets paid regardless of how well the ad performs so if they stick the ad at the bottom of the screen (this happened on goldfiles.com even though there were unpopulated TextAdMarket ad blocks higher on the screen) the advertiser stands a smaller chance of making a return on investment. By indicating in the marketplace whether the ad would go Above The Fold TextAdMarket could deliver more value to the advertiser and charge a slightly higher price, I know I would have paid it. Finally, TextAdMarket is going to need to attract some higher quality publishers, I would suggest buying remenant inventory on some sites and TextAdMarket running those as an in house publisher. Higher quality publishers will result in higher quality advertisers which will ultimately result in higher revenues.

To summarize, TextAdMarket is in a crowded market with the unenviable task of competing where Google dominates. However, their time based purchases could allow them to easily carve out a nice segment of the market catering to advertisers that don’t want to worry about keyword bids or budgeting. The site is simple enough to use that any advertiser regardless of size can get an ad up and running in less that 30 minutes. There are some quality control issues to be addressed and some ways that can increase advertiser value while allowing TextAdMarket to charge higher price. If TextAdMarket can attract some higher quality publishers I would say they could have a lucrative, easy to manage, source of revenue as a facilitator for time based ad buys.

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