Optimizing Kontera Ads

I have to admit that I have not been optimizing Kontera as much as I have been optimizing Google AdSense or affiliate networks, mainly because I use Kontera only here.

By not optimizing and playing around with Kontera Contextual advertising I am aware that the earnings with Kontera haven’t reached their full power of earnings. Another point that keeps Kontera’s earnings out of its limits is the fact that this blog does not have that heap of traffic where I can actually have more accurate data as for how far should I be pushing it, and as if thats not enough Kontera delays their data (for example, today 11th February while I am writing this post I don’t have any informations regarding impressions or clicks for 8-9 and 10th of February), thats 3 days without any clue what has been going on.

The delay on data might get me suspicious and get me weird thoughts crossing over my mind, but lets just say I wont even bother with that and will call it a glitch (after all, Kontera recently implemented a new interface so its most likely a glitch in their system), but still remains the fact that it doesn’t give you much freedom on optimizing your Kontera ads.

In addition with the new interface you get some great informations such as keywords on which you received clicks, URLs on which you received clicks and the percentage of clicks a keyword has brought to you. After a short period of close lookup on these new data you can figure out what works and what doesn’t, but will explain that few lines bellow.

My Kontera Optimization Process

At day one I had great CPC (Cost Per Click) and it did not took long to get effected but that well known term that we use for our Adsense ads, smart priced. In fact the cost per click drastically dropped and I was struggling with cents per clicks and was almost going to give up from Kontera and even remove their code.

But who in the earth would dare to remove something without even trying to optimize the ads and see if that can be improved? Well someone, not me I want to explore and study things.

The click through rate was not better then the click per cost. At the beginning I had blended the ads with the rest of the site, used the same color for the ads as I use for links. It is worthless to tell you how Kontera ads are manifested in your pages but I’ll give it a shot. The javascript code which you have used to install the Kontera ad will pick keywords of your content and will double underline them, with a mouseover effect a window will appear and then a click on the windows is required for you to earn money (not the shortest process but still okey). So my first problem was CTR and I had to get that resolved some how. Reading some of my blog posts I figured out that the keywords that were double underlined and had the same color scheme as my links did not made much sense (did not made much sense to be LINKED).

Usually when you interlink it should make sense supposedly, i.e. linking to explain something more in depth. But linking to words like “blog” did not made sense to me much and apparently to the visitors of the blog neither. My attempt to get the CTR resolved was to outstand the ads instead of blend them with the rest of the site. As you can see, the Kontera ads are in blue color and outstanding totally from the rest of the layout. This change did not do magic, but it clearly distinguished the real links from the Kontera ads for me and for my visitors, which slightly improved the CTR (yeah, from 0 clicks a day to 1 click a day, hah) Note: outstanding ads might work for me better, but blending might work for you so just test them both.

The next and biggest problem was the Cost Per Click, thats how much money I was earning for each click visitors would make on the Kontera Contextual ads. Again the solution was right under my nose since the beginning but I thought that by outstanding the ads and improving the CTR it will also improve the CPC (emm, what?). The real problem was that all the double lined keywords were covered mainly by 3 advertisers. Simple math, unrelated keywords + same advertisers = not going to work. The unrelated keyword advertisements and these 3 advertisers that were overtaking all the ad spaces were killing the rest, advertisers that advertise for related keywords and that most likely pay more per click to get customers.

The 3 advertisers (shopping.com dealtime.com and thefreedictionary.com) were not only covering all the ads on my posts but they were also paying pennies for them (like 0.01-0.03 per click). Kontera in some kind of way is similar to adsense and you can block advertisers from advertising in your website just that the process in not the same since you don’t have the option to manually block the advertisers websites by yourself, instead you need to write an email to support at kontera dot kom and request that they block those advertisers from your site.

This change, doubled the CPC with my Kontera Contextual ads and as improved the click through rate since the keyword advertisements were more related to the nature of this blog and as well to the post itself.

One of the ways to improve your Kontera earnings just as with any other PPC or affiliate sales is the increase your traffic, the higher the traffic the higher the CTR will be (logically), but I still do see some more ways how the Kontera ads can be optimized and will make sure to post about that in the near feature once I test them out. If you want to follow the updated and not miss them out, subscribe to my RSS feed or have the posts delivered to you via email.

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