Performancing Partners – First Impression Review

Performancing have just shot an email out to their newsletter list announcing their long awaited Performancing Partners program – an ad network which will rival BlogAds and which will be of interest to bloggers wishing to make money blogging.

It’s not really a secret as they’ve been quite open about the process but as of today you can now sign up as a publisher or advertiser.

The process is fairly simple – you place their code on your site and Advertisers can then sign up to place their ad on your site with you taking 70% of the revenue and Performancing taking 30% (you can see what happens when you add the code in my own sidebar (scroll down). Until ads are bought Performancing’s ad shows.

Pricing

Publishers can either set their own price for ads or can use ‘Auto Pricing’ which examines your blog’s impressions, click stats etc to come up with a price. Auto pricing takes up to 48 hours to be worked out – I’m still waiting to see what they’ll price ProBlogger ads at (more on pricing here). The most expensive ad in the system at present is $323.00 for the month with most ads being priced at around the $1.60 to $1.90 CPM range.

Payments are made at the start of each month via paypal.

You also take 5% of income generated by any publisher or advertiser that you refer to the system – indefinitely (nice).

The ads

What are the ads like? Well I’m yet to see any on the sites that are listed in the advertisers section but if they are anything like the performancing placeholder house ad they are not too large, have rounded corners and have a little text box that appears when you scroll over them.

The system is quite like BlogAds.com but on a first impression it’s a lot simpler and more useable system. Time will tell whether advertisers take it up though (BlogAds has a long head start).

A few other details

• Ad Approval – Publishers get to approve each ad that shows on their site before it appears.
• Other Ad Networks – They do allow you to run these ads with any other type of advertising that you choose.
• Minimum Payments – There’s no minimum amount earned before you’ll be paid.
• Numbers of Ads – You can choose to show up to 6 ads on your site (or as little as 1).

How to use the Performancing Partner Ads

It’s early days so it’s too soon to really make any predictions on how this will go (keep in mind that it’s in beta and a system that will no doubt need to be tweaked). However a couple of tips on how to get the most out of them come to mind:

1. Put your ads as high on your sidebar as possible – I find with BlogAds that advertisers are much more willing to purchase an ad that is above the fold. This is of course a challenge for some of us (for example here at ProBlogger the space at the top of my Sidebar is at a premium) however I suspect it’ll be more likely to convert to sales if you can put your ads high on your sidebar.

2. Keep a Careful Eye on the Auto Price – I’ve seen two pricing strategies employed successfully by publishers over at BlogAds. Some publishers undercut their competitors while others use premium pricing. I suspect that the same thing will happen here – it’s worth experimenting. Check out what price the auto pricing gives you and then start experimenting with prices above and below it.

What I’d love to see from Performancing Partners

It’s too early to review the performance of these ads – I think the challenge will be finding advertisers as there are so many other ad networks for them to buy ads in. Without them publishers won’t allow house ads to be shown for too long. Hopefully Performancing are willing to put some serious effort into selling ads for publishers to get the ball rolling.

A few other features come to mind that I’d like to see added:

• Referral Buttons – I’d like to see Performancing develop some buttons/banners similar to Text-Link-Ads has for people to refer advertisers and publishers with their affiliate program. This type of promotion will bring more advertisers and publishers into the system (key for success).
• Free House Ads – One feature that I love with BlogAds is the ability to run my own ads for free using a coupon code. This means I can make the ad section look used (attractive to other publishers) but also do cross promotion between blogs as well as promote affiliate programs.
• Ad Examples – I have to admit that when I first went to the site to look at this new network that I was somewhat confused about what type of ads the network ran. Perhaps I read through all the information too quickly but it took me a while to work out if they were text ads, banner ads, button ads etc. Perhaps some examples of the types of ads that people could run would be good both for publishers (to see if they fit with the vibe of their sites) and advertisers (especially).
• Multiple Ad Spots – Another technique that BlogAd publishers have open to them is having Blog Ads appear on multiple locations on the one site. This allows them to price the ads in premium positions at a much higher rate and have lower priced ads for lower on the side bar. Some of the big political blogs do this and have used it very very successfully.

All in all Performancing’s Partners program looks like it has real potential. I am looking forward to see how it performs and suspect it’ll do well – especially knowing the caliber of people behind it and involved with performancing.