Google Adwords currently leads
content-sensitive web-based marketing solution for internet
advertizers. By participating in the Google AdWords program
advertizers can have their text, image and video based ads shown
on selected publishers sites that include Google AdWords JavaScript code. Google's servers show context sensitive
advertisements (Google Adwords). However, a number of
excellent alternatives exist, for example, the left hand side of
this page shows a
Clicksor skyscraper displaying
a text or image ad just like Google Adwords.
However, Google's
popularity also means that it is not necessarily the best
solution for most small advertisers. Many small businesses are
struggling to obtain effective internet advertizing through the
Adwords program. They find that the bid prices (or Cost per
Click) on Adwords can be prohibitively high. This makes
advertizing campaigns extremely expensive and of limited
effectiveness. Hence a number of competing alternative programs
exist that offer much better value for money than Adwords. By
using these programs in place of Adwords advertisers can
significantly increase traffic to their websites for a lot less
money.
In addition to the cost Google Adwords has
very stringent terms and conditions are that mean that many
would be advertisers are turned away. If you are not
satisfied with your Google Adwords experience or are looking for
more cost effective alternatives then take a look at these Top 10 alternatives to Google's Adwords
program that are ideal
for the small time advertiser and business.
AdBrite
is the clear leader of the adwords alternatives for small
time advertizers.
As an advertiser you can use
AdBrite to set your own ad rates
and instantly reach over 370 million visitors on more than 80,000 sites all with
a single campaign buy. AdBrite's market share is growing all the time.
Publishers just place a small snippet of HTML
placed on their site, while
AdBrite handles serving, scheduling, billing, customer service,
and sales. About half of AdBrite's sales are generated from their marketplace and
sales team, while the other half are generated from users clicking "Your Ad
Here" on our publisher's sites. The best thing about AdBrite is that you can
reach a very large number of potential customers for
significantly less than you would have to pay with AdWords.
While
AdBrite can provide
advertisers with better ads and formats, more exposure and
better conversion rates for less money than
traditional ad networks such as Google AdSense their approach works fine along-side them as
a simple way to increase your campaign exposure. Additionally as an advertiser
you can purchase ads directly on sites showing AdBrite ads
for very cost effective rates -- something the other ad systems don't
typically do.
AdBrite doesn't
show the big "brick" of ads that you're normally used to but
rather
AdBrite gives
advertisers full control over the look and feel of their ads so AdBrite
campaigns can stand out on any website.
There is no obligation to purchase when
you can sign up and you can play with all of their tools and
experiment before purchasing any ads.
Click here to sign up.
Bidvertiser can be a
much more cost effective and useful alternative to
Google Adwords.
BidVertiser offers some intriguing ad formats including
what they refer to as free design. This lets you specify
the look and dimensions of your text ads and as an
advertiser means that you can design ads that will stand out
from the crowd and so maximize your conversion ratio and
reduce your advertising costs on unrelated clicks. While a useful
feature I have not investigated how well it works but
imagine that while it sounds good on paper it could be
difficult to setup. However, the custom nature of it means
that it probably results in lower priced ads which makes it
much more cost effective for you as an advertiser.
Another great thing about
BidVertiser is that you can use it to drive
customers to your eBay listings. Hence if you are a
major user of eBay for your business then
Bidvertiser may be the perfect solution for
directing customers searching for related items to your
eBay listings. Once you select your eBay item the ad is
created for you automatically with the minimum amount of
effort.
BidVertiser includes a complex fraud-detection
system that protects its customers from click fraud,
ensuring that only valid and legit clicks are counted.
Each click is processed online by their fraud-detection
system, using a sophisticated algorithm that is being
constantly updated by the fraud-detection team.
Bidvertiser have also recently introduced two knew
features that can boost your conversion rates and target
broader audiences:
Conversion Bonus
As far as I am aware
Bidvertiser is the first affiliate marketer to offer
this seemingly obvious service. As well as offering traditional CPC for each valid click
Bidvertiser will now track those clicks and if they
turn into valid leads will pay a conversion
bonus. As an advertizer this provides you with an
excellent way to track your incoming clicks and monitor
if they successfully turn into effective leads.
Revenue Generating Toolbar The second new feature offered by
Bidvertiser is the customized toolbar. The BidVertiser Toolbar allows
people to distribute their own customized toolbar to website
visitors. This toolbar supersedes other search engines
so placing your ads directly on the search results page
for a fraction of the cost of what AdWords would cost
you.
If you want you can download an example
of the toolbar using the link below to try it out.
Chitika - The Leader in Impulse Merchandising Chitika (pronounced
CHIH-tih-ka) is different to most other internet advertizing
companies and presents an intriguing alternative to Adwords.
Founded in 2003 Chitika is the industry leader in impulse
merchandising.
Chitika supports innovative publisher-side
advertising and merchandising solutions and services that
will help you maximize your advertizing campaign and attain
the highest possible conversion ratios.
The key to
Chitika being a successful Adwords
alternative is that instead of standing alone as a single
advertising solution
Chitika provides a way to compliment
your existing advertising campaigns by featuring your
products for sale directly through their advertisements.
They provide Ad Units which are very different from the
standard pop-unders and ad boxes that everybody else
provides. The key difference is that instead of displaying
the
'industry standard' advert boxes with image, video and text
Chitika, in addition to traditional ads also provides active boxes
that show targeted products from your advertising
campaigns.What
happens is that Chitika tracks people arriving at the
website via search engines and then converts the search
engine string into a series of related products that it then
shows in the advertisement and on which the visitor can
click to purchase. This is referred to as impulse marketing
and works in the form of
what
Chitika
refers to as Premium Ad Units. The beauty of this approach
is that it means the ads shown to the site visitor are much
more relevant to what the visitor was originally searching
for.
For advertisers and media buyers,
Chitika
is a proven channel for targeting on-line consumers and
qualified buyers. If you visit a site
showing Chitika's ads from a search engine then the
Chitika
premium ad unit kicks in showing you ads that are specific
to your searching -
otherwise the publisher can have it show an alternative ad provider,
such as adsense, or they can just have it collapse away to
show nothing.
Recently added new features from Chitika
include:
List Unit
The Chitika List Unit (CLU) is a powerful extension of
the MPU which automatically adjusts its height, ensuring
no ugly white-space and thus a cleaner user experience.
These can also be referred to as rotating ads. Such
units really come into their own on devices such as
iPads which support dynamically rotating screens.
With the use of a rotating CLU you can have your ad
automatically adjust to fill all the space on the
screen. This also draws the users eye directly to the
ads.
Mobile Code Adverts specifically designed to be shown on
mobile content.
Pay per call Ads These ads are 'action based' ads which have a much
higher conversion rates than click through ads since
they actually put you in direct voice contact with the
customer. Designed for local ads they greatly increase
action rates since local viewers are more likely to
click these ads because it will put them in direct
contact with the advertiser.
Chitika allows you to display targeted products
based on what people searched for to get to the page
providing
a robust comparative shopping experience and an additional
way to advertise your goods.
A relative newcomer to the scene
Infolinks specializes in In-Text Advertizing. That is it
indexes pages looking for keywords and phrases that are
not currently links and converts them into advertizing
links. As an advertiser this means that you can use
Infolinks to show ads that look like links on a publishers
site. When someone clicks on a link the ad is shown and they
are redirected to your site. In this way you can attract
users to your site without them necessarily realizing they
are visiting an ad. This leads to higher click thru rates
and higher conversion rates than the traditional banner and
skyscraper ads. The nice part is that
Infolinks compliments existing advertizing campaigns and
many publishers run it alongside other ad providers. This
means that as a publisher you can often advertise cheaply on
sites that would otherwise be very expensive for traditional
banner ads.
Infolinks claims to be leading the industry with the
most relevant in-text advertising links guaranteed. I am not sure how they
'guarantee' this but having used them for several months I
can attest that their keyword engine is very good and they
produce very relevant links compared to
other In-Text advertizing options.
The unobtrusiveness
of this ad style also makes it more attractive to your
audience since they are not continuously annoyed by flashing
banners and pop ups and instead visit your site in a more
engaged fashion.
Intellilinks is a similar service to infolinks above but
well worth trying.
Intellilinks specializes in placing organic text links
across an ever-growing network of websites in order to build
rank and traffic for advertisers and increased revenue for
publishers.
Intellilinks focuses on providing cutting edge
technology, while keeping the network seamless and secure to
bring results to their clients and revenue to their
publishers.
For advertizers
Intellilinks offers the following features:
Clean, organic link building with a network of
high quality sites.
Links within your specific niche for greater
effectiveness.
Our links are sold for a flat monthly rate - not
based on traffic or clicks.
Intellilinks offers clean, organic links on a large
network of quality sites. All links are served as static
HTML and are spidered by search engines. Links can be
purchased in both the layout of the website, or within the
context of an article or blog post.
Intellilinks has no obligation and costs nothing to join
or use. They offer free links to those signing up through
links on this website.
Kontera works in a similar way to
Infolinks above, however, they have been around for much
longer. Traditionally as a publisher it was hard to get accepted by
Kontera but they seem to have relaxed their restrictions
of late. This meant as an advertiser your audience was
somewhat limited to the very big clients. However, now it
looks like Kontera is expanding giving a much broader target
audience.
Kontera is extremely easy to use.
Publishers simply add a few
lines of code to the end of your webpage and within 24 hours
additionally links start showing up on their page. These
links serve
Kontera Ads.
When the user hovers over a link ad an shows up and if the
user clicks on it the pubisher is paid. From an advertisers
perspective this good because you can have complex picture
and video ads that get shown to the user but only if they
click on it do you get charged. If you look at some sites
that use Kontera you will see this to good effect. While this service does not provide you
with a complete replacement for all your ad serving need, since they do
not provide banner creatives etc., it does provide an
additional way to market things in a way that you know will
always be relevant, since it is keywords you specify that
are highlighted. The links are context sensitive and relevant so
conversion ratios can be very high for well designed
ads.
Kontera is nice because it is simply Plug and Play and
it provides an alternative advertising stream to the generic
banner ads that everybody is now used to subconsciously
ignoring.
It does not require any additional space or layout
considerations since it is integrated directly with the text
and so your ad shows up completely uncluttered.
In my opinion the inline text ads also look smarter than a
lot of other offerings.
In May 2011 Kontera started rolling out
additional features designed to improve the advertizing
experience for both publishers and advertizers alike. These
represent extensions of what
Kontera do today and are intended to deliver better
value and more targeted exposure for advertizers. The
Retargeting offering is part of
Kontera's Audience Program and leverages their unique
ability to understand and assess user interest via a
semantic engine designed to provide more focused and
effective advertizing.
Kontera's Retargeting presents a unique opportunity for
advertizers to gain greater targeted exposure from their
Kontera ads.
Kontera finds interested consumers on publisher sites
and qualifies their interest by leveraging their Synapse
technology. When they see these users elsewhere on the web
they show them relevant banners and share the revenues with
the publisher where the user first expressed interest.
The value add for the advertiser includes:
1) Additional exposure to specifically
targeted audiences.
2) No technical requirements
3) No change to user experience
4) Ability to participate in an exciting and novel
growth area in advertising
Exit Junction
is a new affiliate program that was spun
off from Revenue Pilot which is now defunct. Exit
Junction is not strictly an adsense alternative but
instead is an excellent addition to adsense and other
context sensitive advertising programs. The key aspect
of
Exit Junction
that makes it a unique new way to advertise and drive
traffic to your site is that their
approach is capture exit traffic from a site. The way
this works is as follows: Suppose a user runs a Google
search and a website you are advertising on scores
highly for that keyword. To have your link appear as a
sponsored link for this keyword on Google would be
expensive. However, consider that the user then goes to
the first site returned by Google and that site is
running the
Exit Junction
code. At first nothing happens, the page loads and the
user sees the page as normal. However say they now found
that this site was not what they were looking for and
they hit the back button in their browser. This is where
Exit Junction
cuts in and provides unique advertising opportunities.
Instead of returning to the Google search
Exit Junction
intercepts the back command and instead shows a series
of sponsored links that match the original Google search
term.
The neat feature of
Exit Junction
is that at present it is novel and hence the user, who was
not expecting the back button to show them an ad instead of
their original search page will be more likely to notice the
ad and use it to visit your site.
Exit Junction
is therefore an ideal way to complement your existing
advertising efforts and will likely generate some very high
conversion rates.
Clicksor is one of the major leaders in the field providing
CPC and CPM advertizing solutions that are similar to Adwords but much cheaper
and more effective for small businesses. They offer a huge range of advertizing
formats including all of the standard Adwords formats as well as some very
effective alternatives such as pop under and interstitial ads.
Clicksor also
lets you sign up for both an advertiser and a publisher account and then freely
transfer your publishing income to your advertizing account in order to reduce
your advertizing costs.
One of the great things about
Clicksor is
that they have a large network of high quality publishers
while still offering bid prices that are significantly lower
than equivalent keywords on Adwords. They are also, in my experience, much more tollerant
than Google. Clicksor also supports showing ads as Google public service ad
alternatives so you can still access Google Adsense
publisher sites and traffic but for significantly less
money.
Clicksor also has a big advantage over a
number of the lower ranked alternatives on this site in that
their ads are truly context sensitive. Thus as an advertiser
you can be sure that your ads show only on relevant sites so
maximizing your click to customer conversion ratio. This means
that
visitors to websites showing ads are exposed to ads of the same subject as they were
searching for when they reached the site. This means the
effectiveness of your ads is maximized.
Clicksor allows you to start advertising from just 0.3c per click.
Significantly cheaper than the 5c minimum demanded by Adwords.
The ad creation and campaign control tools provided by
Clicksor are not perfect but they
are more than enough for you to perfect your ads and keep track of all of your
campaigns and expenditure.
A relative new comer to the field is
Pocket Cents.
Pocket Cents has been built from the ground up
as a Click Banner provider. Specializing in automatic focus
on local markets
Pocket Cents offers an intriguing
alternative to adsense/adwords. While unlikely to replace
your entire creative portfolio,
Pocket Cents does off an
attractive alternative for banner ads. Also being new means
that there is less competition for ad space, giving you,
potentially, better exposure to your ads.
"Location based advertisements
generate precisely targeted traffic to your website
increasing internet sales and decreasing advertising
costs."
It remains to be seen how effective this
will ultimately be but the idea, from an advertisers
perspective is that it gives you a more relevant audience
for your ads and so better conversion rates. They also offer
a flat rate on clicks meaning as an advertiser you do not
need to worry about your never ad being shown because it is
always outbid or your ads costing you a fortune in heated
bidding wars. The
following shows an example banner ad from
Pocket Cents.
Dynamic Oxygen are a relative newcomer to the field
having really only started at the end of 2010. However,
they are growing quickly and offer an excellent
alternative to the traditional Adwords route.
Dynamic Oxygen encourages advertisers of all sizes to
realize their sites' potential! One of the nice
things being that they are not focused purely on the
high end, very high turnover advertisers as well as
publishers but instead
cater to sites of all shapes, sizes and popularity. This
means that even advertisers with small budgets can still
get useful targeted exposure. DynamicOxygen's focus
also includes most international sites unlike many ad
providers that only cater for US or European traffic,
DynamicOxygen supports advertizing for worldwide
traffic making it ideal for non-US based advertisers and publishers.
In particular they feature:
Benefit from targeted ads with High
eCPM for your ENTIRE traffic.
Support for international
traffic.
Enjoy unique ad formats not found
elsewhere, such as Interstitials, Layer Ads, Peeler Ads,
Anchor Ads, and more...
Superb Support
You can sign up for a no obligation, risk free account and
give
DynamicOxygen a try by following this
link.
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