WidgetBucks - Site Category Assignments to Improve CPMs

WidgetBucks publishers looking for increased CPM earnings on non-US and Canada traffic now have the ability to assign their site(s) into one of 40 categories, such as technology, sports, gaming, health and business/finance. Assigning a category to a site where a WidgetBucks widget resides gives advertisers the ability to reach more targeted audience segments and, most importantly, a reason to pay higher rates to publishers. Because we just rolled out this change, it's difficult to estimate the exact increase in CPM but we will provide some trend insight on this over the next couple of weeks. Also, since the CPM platform is a “learning” system, expect fluctuations in CPM rates as it learns what ad content is performing best on your site (i.e. advertisers pay higher CPM rates for ad content that has a good CTR).

Since putting CPM ads in place mid-December, rates have been paid based on generalized country of site traffic -- not a specific type or topic of site and therefore rates have been at the low end of the scale. Making this update does not require any code changes to widgets and can be done through these steps:

Step 1. Within “My Settings,” assign a default site category from the pull-down menu. Any new widget created will carry this default as its site category value, however, existing widgets will not be assigned the default -- those will need to be assigned individually (see Step 2 below). The default site category can be manually overridden within a specific widget without impacting other widgets. For example, if the default site category is set to "Music" and a widget is subsequently placed on a health-related site, the "Health" category could be assigned to the new widget to yield higher CPM rates. Also, be sure to select PayPal as your payment method so you can receive payments more quickly.

Step 2. Within "MyWidgets," using the "edit" link for each existing widget, assign a site type (Step No. 6 within that page) that is most applicable to the site where the widget resides. While editing the widget, be sure to check your product choice to ensure those selected are the most appropriate/applicable. See the site category pull-down within a widget customization page.

In other news, WidgetBucks is making a change to its Terms of Service to cap at two (2) the number of WidgetBucks ad widgets that can be placed on any given page. The new program policy within Exhibit A now reads: “Widgets may not be placed on pages published specifically for the purpose of showing ads, whether or not the page content is relevant. No more than 1 to 2 ads per page are allowed.” We want to maintain a healthy and profitable network - a number of sites have WidgetBucks ad widgets plastered on their site – which negatively impacts CPM rates.

Articles - by : Dean (WidgetBucks)