Last night, our CEO, Todd Vernon, and COO, Walter Knapp, were interviewed by Bloggers School on Blog Talk Radio. They discussed the history of Lijit, the business model behind our company and how our search adds value to both the publisher and the blog reader. The majority of the interview centered around questions about Lijit’s premium Ad Network and how we’re making it even easier for bloggers to make money on their blogs. Give it a listen if you want to hear more from the top dogs themselves.
The last few days I was in New York at the OMMA Global Conference. The OMMA Conference gathers Ad Industry experts to discuss where online advertising has been and where it’s going. This year, the title was “The New Socialism” and talked about how social media is often the key to engagement between brands and audiences. Of course, we already knew that. Lijit is based on engaging your readers with your Brand through all the social connections you have. It was fun to see Madison Avenue coming to the same conclusion.
There were lots of good panels including one entitled “The Mommy Bloggers - What It’s Like When Marketers Really, Really Want You”. That panel featured a couple of Lijitpublishers and many thought-provoking insights.
OMMA was very interesting to me because lately, we have been approached by some major brands to help them reach very specific audiences within our publisher base. When there’s a convergence between a publisher’s audience and a Brand, we offer the opportunity to the publisher. Sometimes these are specific Ads within a publisher’s search results page, sometimes these are display campaigns that we offer to our publishers for the content pages, and sometimes they are cool interactive applications that run on the publisher’s site.
Of course, we only offer these opportunities to our publishers if they have expressed an interest in monetizing their site with us. We respect that many publishers simply want to deliver a great experience for their readers and monetizing is not important. For those that are interested, major brands are looking for audiences like yours, and we talk with them every day.
If you’re a Lijit publisher and have not heard from us about a specific opportunity, it’s most likely that we haven’t found the right opportunity for you yet. If you are interested in hearing more, please send us a note. If not - no problem, we want to make sure we are the best solution in helping your readers effectively connect with your Brand!
At Lijit, we continually try new things to improve the end-to-end search experience for our publishers. Knowing that revenue is a key driver for some publishers, we took a hard look at how we displayed ads in search results, and experimented with a few ideas to see if we could increase ad performance. On April 30, we launched a new ad layout in our search results and asked a few of our publishers if they would try it out. With a couple weeks of data collected, the participating publishers saw an increase in the ratio of clicks to searches ranging from 10% to 300%.
What did we do, you may ask. We increased the number of ads at the top of the page from 1 ad to four. We also eliminated the yellow background of the top ad unit, and modified the text colors of the ad. If you would like to have your search results pages displayed with the new layout, please click here to let us know.
While we were under the hood, our developers made some modifications to the way the ads and search results load, resulting in a quicker overall load time for each search results page. These changes that relate to speed are already in place for all publishers, regardless of the ad layout. Because they are your search results pages, if you prefer to keep the existing layout, don’t do anything. You’ll still see the faster load times.
While we expect these changes to bring about ad performance improvements, we will continue try new things to make it even better in the future.
This blog post comes to you courtesy of our amazing Director of Ad Serving, Dave. He loves writing these posts almost as much as he loves me bugging him to write these posts. But not as much as he loves fly-fishing.
This week, Lijit has released the latest version of our ad platform. The two key features for this release are the introduction of commissions that will be paid to publishers for advertiser referrals, and the launch of our closed beta program for ad placement on the content pages of our publishers.
Publisher Commissions
Publishers will earn commissions in two ways for referring advertisers who create keyword search ad campaigns. Direct referrals are made by publishers who send the link found on the “Sell Your Ad Inventory” tab to an advertiser who builds a campaign. Indirect referrals are made when an advertiser clicks on the “Advertise Here” link found on the Lijit Search Results and creates a campaign. In each case, Lijit will pay the referring publisher a commission for each valid click. The amount that publishers earn for clicks on their search results page is unaffected by the commission structure.
Content Page Ad Placement
To provide publishers with additional ways to monetize their sites, we are building upon our existing ad platform to offer publishers the ability to place ads on the content pages of their sites. Publishers will have the ability to choose between placing text ads or image ads on their sites, and what size they want their ads to be.
Publishers will be compensated on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis, meaning that the publisher’s account will be credited based on page views, rather than clicks. Before opening this up to everyone, Lijit is going to run a closed beta program, so that we can gather real feedback from real publishers that we will use to optimize the publisher experience. If you would like to participate in the beta program, please click here.
Please keep an eye out for more information about Lijit’s program for content page ad placement and how you can participate.
