We just added four more markets for which we have PPC text ads via our partners at Yahoo! Search Marketing: Colombia, Chile, Peru and Venezuela. Given we already have ads for Spain, Mexico and Argentina, that means we cover most of the hispanic market, and sites with content in Spanish should get better coverage and better revenue!
Our good friends of Tradedoubler announced the launch of their new contextual ads service, named AdMatch. It looks nice, but Oxado is better 
All in all, if you thought about using Tradedoubler’s Admatch, there are a lot more reasons to use Oxado!
We now have ads for India directly from Yahoo Search Marketing, which will increase the per-click revenue for visitors from this country. Enjoy!
Just a quick word to let you know we now have CPC text ads for Argentina, courtesy of Yahoo Search Marketing. With the existing ads for Spain and Mexico, that should cover a significant part of the spanish-speaking market.
For a long time, Google Adsense Terms of Service prohibited having any other contextual advertising on the same page as theirs, and that included Oxado banners. However, this changed last year, and now the only requirement is that there is no risk of confusion, and that ads other than Google’s be recognized as such, basically by using a different set of colors. You can see it in their own terms here:
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=32849
That means you can have both Google Adsense and Oxado banners on the same page, and increase your revenue opportunities, rather than having to chose only one of the two.
Also don’t forget you can use Oxado banners as Google Adsense alternate ads (to be displayed instead of Public Service Ads).
If you have used the search box on our home page recently to check for advertisers on various keywords, you may have noticed we added a few options on the search results page. One allows you to see results for a specific country/language combination (the default being your own), another to select whether adult results are allowed or not, and the last one, which we are going to tackle today, allows you to select search or contextual mode and see associated results for any keyword.
First of all, why are there two modes? Simply because people actively searching for something (and typing a request in a search box for instance) are way more likely to click on the ad, and then to actually buy the advertised product or service. This means such users are more valuable to advertisers (they bring in more revenue, on average), and advertisers are thus likely to spend more money to get those.
On the other hand, contextual users are certainly interested in the product or service advertised (otherwise they wouldn’t be clicking on the ad), especially since it relates to the page they’re currently reading, but they’re still a little bit less likely to actually buy the product and service in the end. This means advertisers will not be willing to pay as much, and in some situations, they don’t want to use contextual mode at all.
Of course, contextual mode is still better than the “plain random” mode that many other networks use (and that we use in some cases, mainly when we do not have contextual ads for the user’s country).
Note that not all our partners make a distinction between the two modes, but Yahoo! Search Marketing, who provide the best paying PPC ads for the UK, Australia, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Spain, Mexico and Brazil, actually does make that distinction.
Now, you wonder, since Oxado is operating a contextual ad network, what’s the purpose of search mode? It’s pretty simple: our engine will automatically recognize a user that is actually doing a search, and switch to search mode when required. It might do this because a user has used a search box on your site, or because the user ended up on your site after doing a search on another site (most likely a search engine). Our software will then pick up the search query the user entered, and fetch and display relevant “search mode” ads specifically for this query. Being very targeted, you’ll get even higher click rates than usual, and being in “search mode”, there are more ads, and they get paid more.
Again, you wonder, if all of this is automatic, why am I ranting about it? There are still a few things to know: if you want our engine to recognize searches on your site, make sure your form uses the GET method rather than the POST method (it actually makes more sense semantically too, POST should be used only for requests that actually change something, not to fetch data), so that the search query appears in the URL. Also make sure you use a sensible query parameter name. We recognize most of the standard ones out there, just make sure you don’t use the parameter “schblorg” for the query, we might have a hard time finding out it’s actually a query!
The other point is that for our engine to be able to pick up searches that led to your site, avoid putting the banners in frames (or iframes) at all costs (they’re bad for the contextualization in any case), and don’t hesitate to place large Oxado banners prominently on pages that get a lot of search engine traffic. For the PHP and other dynamic page gurus out there, you might even consider displaying a larger or more preminent Oxado banner when the HTTP_REFERER matches any of the big search engines.
I hope this will help you get more revenue with Oxado!
Certains d’entre vous ont peut-être déjà entendu parler de la mésaventure d’Incredimail (une compagnie côtée sur le NASDAQ) dont le contrat Adsense a été brutalement suspendu, et qui a ainsi perdu une bonne partie de ses revenus. La conclusion n’est pas très originale: ne mettez pas tous vos oeufs (ou même la majorité d’entre eux) dans le même panier! Vous savez où est le lien pour vous inscrire
Some of your may have read about Incredimail (a public company listed on NASDAQ) having their Adsense contract terminated, and thus losing a big chunck of their revenue (IncrediMail Receives Notice from Google Regarding AdSense Program). This should teach everyone an old lesson: don’t put all your eggs (of even most of them) in the same basket, and use other sources of advertising on your sites. You know where the sign-up button is
Just a quick update to let you know that we are in the process of adding (without any downtime) a couple of brand new Dell MD1000 disk arrays with 15 SAS 15Kprm disks each (configured as RAID10). This brings us to a total of 111 disks, along with 157 GB of RAM and 59 processor cores (many of them hyper-threaded) used to serve the ads, running 36 installs of FreeBSD, 2 instances of pf/pfsync/carp, 2 instances of pound, 21 instances of Apache, 13 instances of memcached, 33 instances of PostgreSQL, 6 instances of Slony-I, and of course a ton of our own software.
Hope you enjoy the ads as much as we have fun managing all this!
As announced yesterday, all payments for this month have been sent today. Those who get paid by Moneybookers or Paypal already have the money on their accounts. Bank transfers should get on your account by Friday for most people, sometime next week in the worst case.
Enjoy, and Merry Christmas!