What I like about the new look ShoppingAds is that it combines both CPA (cost per action) ads AND CPC (cost per click) ads into the one product.
There are two levels of publishers – Standard Publishers and Premium Publishers.
Standard publishers will only have the option for CPA ads while premium publishers get both depending upon where their traffic is from.
If you qualify as a Premium Publisher (from what I can tell they are promoted to Premium status based upon the ‘quality’ of traffic that the site has – not sure exactly what this means) you’ll have CPC ads served to all visitors from the USA and Canada and CPA ads to all other traffic. Here’s how they visualize it:
This makes a lot of sense to me. Other programs (like WidgetBucks) serve their normal ads to US traffic but to ‘international’ traffic they serve banner ads which pay out at CPM rates (per 1000 impressions). From what I’ve heard these CPM payouts are tiny and some of the banner ads are completely irrelevant to most sites and can be quite ugly.
ShoppingAds on the other hand continue to serve relevant ads whether they are showing CPC or CPA ads and they all have a consistent look about them. This will definitely be an option to experiment with if you have traffic from outside of the US.
I’m yet to test these on my sites – but will be doing so shortly. They have performed reasonably well for me previously though – particularly they’ve done quite well on sites with product related content.
For those of you already running AuctionAds on your blog – you don’t need to do anything to change to ShoppingAds. Your ads will continue to run as normal and the only real change is that there will be an ‘Ads by ShoppingAds’ link on your ads now.
Affiliate Bonus – The other thing I like about these ads is that if someone clicks the ‘Ads by ShoppingAds’ link on your ad unit and signs up as a publisher – you earn 5% of what they earn for the next 6 months.
