But – with the prevalence of banner ads, visitor’s to a site and potential interaction with a banner ad can be diminished by what has come to be known as ‘banner blindness’: so many demands for attention contribute to a generalized apathy and no interest in ads. The image below shows an example of this using eye tracking technology; the difference in color ‘temperature’ (blue coldest, red hottest) depicts the different reading styles (skimming, browsing and in depth reading):

(image courtesy of: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/banner-blindness.html)

Bottom line: if users know what they are looking for or are really interested in your site’s content, they are not distracted by ads. In fact, visitors will completely ignore things that even appear as ads, even if they are not e.g., content of the site not framed in green but where one would expect an ad).

(For those interested, there are some great eye tracking videos on: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/banner-blindness.html.)

Given the very real potential of banner blindness – here are some best practices that we recommend for both publishers and advertisers:

1. Keep it simple. The majority of users seeing your banner are well versed in gathering information on line. If it is not quick, simple, and to the point, they will ‘check out’ of your ad copy and move on to the next informational nugget. For advertisers, this means keeping things simple and directly to the point: brief ad copy and themed for the majority of the sites running your banner. For publishers, this means choosing ad campaigns and creatives that fit your site well.
2. Do your research. If you want to compete, you need to know your competition, take note of what your successful competition is doing; there is a reason they are successful. For publishers: see a 300×250 in the top left corner on a popular site? Chances are that this is a well thought out and profitable ad placement. For advertisers: notice a common theme or layout in your competitor’s 728×90? Chances are, this banner layout is getting the clicks.
3. Landing pages. Advertisers: follow up your banner ads with a clear action on your landing page. Want a new member signup? Make it as easy and simple as possible for your visitors to sign up. Want a game play? Emphasize your game thumbs and descriptions. Publishers: we take care of this or you – our optimization software considers the entire package, constantly seeking to maximizing your revenue.

As a member Copacet network, both publishers and advertisers gain a distinct advantage over other networks: our optimization routine ensures that only the best performing creatives run on the best performing publisher sites. Following these best practices will always boost your banner ad performance, but optimization algorithms ensure that you receive the best performing sites as an advertiser, and the highest paying revenue as a publisher.

We are very excited to announce our publisher contest! And yes – you read right – we are giving away up to and including $200 per click!

Is this the highest banner CPC ever? As far as we know! =)

We actually have two different campaigns, with 4 different prizes, a weekly prize and a monthly prize. Here is how it works:

Three $50 Weekly Banner Clicks!

Every Monday we will collect all of the banner clicks in our system for the week prior (Sunday to Sunday) and randomly select 3 clicks. If one of the selected clicks originated from your publisher account you will receive $50 in advertising credit on Copacet.com! Only one $50 prize per publisher account per month and all clicks except those originating in China, Vietnam, and the Democratic Republic of Korea are eligible. You will be free to use this $50 credit however you would like on our advertising network. Or if you would rather, this can be redeemed for $25 in cash value on our next payment processing date.

One $200 Monthly Banner Click!

On the first business day of every month we will collect all of the banner clicks in our system for the prior month and randomly select 1 click. If this click is associated with your publishing account you will receive $200 in advertising credit on Copacet.com! All clicks except those originating in China, Vietnam, and the Democratic Republic of Korea are eligible to win – even if you have already won one of the weekly $50 prizes! You may use this $200 advertising credit to purchase advertising on our network, or, if you would like, it may be exchanged for $100 cash, payable on our next payment processing date!

Three $25 Weekly Popunder Impressions!

Every Monday we will collect all of the T1 and T2 popunder impressions in our system for the week prior (Sunday to Sunday) and randomly select 3 impressions. If one of the selected impressions originated from your publisher account you will receive $25 in advertising credit on Copacet.com! Only one $25 prize per publisher account per month and only those impressions originating from T1 geos (US, AU, GB, CA) and T2 geos (AT, BE, CH, DE, DK, ES, FI, FR, IE, IT, NL, NO, NZ, SE, ZA) are eligible. You will be free to use this $25 credit however you would like on our advertising network. Or if you would rather, this can be redeemed for $12.50 in cash value at our next payment processing date.

One $100 Monthly Popunder Impression!

On the first business day of every month we will collect all of the T1 and T2 popunder impressions in our system for the month prior and randomly select 1 impression. If this impression is associated with your publishing account you will receive $100 in advertising credit on Copacet.com! Only those impressions originating in T1 geos (US, AU, GB, CA) and T2 geos (AT, BE, CH, DE, DK, ES, FI, FR, IE, IT, NL, NO, NZ, SE, ZA) are eligible. - even if you have already won one of the weekly $25 prizes! You may use this $100 advertising credit to purchase advertising on our network, or, if you would like, it may be exchanged for $50 cash, payable on our next payment processing date!

Note – the choice of advertising credit or cash must be made prior to the prize being awarded. After the prize is awarded to your account via an invoice, it cannot be changed.

We are starting this April 7, 2013 with the first weekly drawing on April 15, 2013. On May 3, 2013 we will have our first monthly drawing for the entire month of April!

That’s it… so what are you waiting for? You can’t win if you don’t play!

All the best!

(Copacet.com reserves the right to change any part of this contest at any time. But all prizes that are won will be awarded!)

We recently introduced two new features for our banner advertisers: click tracking and page views. These have proven to be very popular, helping our advertisers to block non-performing traffic and boost profitability. In the long run this also benefits our publishers: advertisers are able to pay more for high quality traffic.

So how does click tracking work?

Here are the basics:

First advertisers add a URL parameter to their creatives via a macro that generates a unique ID for each click. Then advertisers place a code snippet (either javascript or PHP, preferably both) on their landing pages which passes the unique ID to our servers when the visitor that clicked on the ad reaches the advertiser’s landing page. In addition, our code tracks subsequent page views by the visitor as a content/site engagement metric. Using both of these together gives a good snapshot of the quality of traffic that an ad placement is sending.

You may have noticed that we provide two different versions of our tracking code, one using javascript and one using PHP. We offer this primarily for one reason: there can be a significant difference between the two statistics, with the PHP tracking generally higher than the javascript based tracking. Why the difference? Ideally there should never be a difference. However, we have noticed that this does occur – even in our own in-house controlled testing environment – and have come up with several possible scenarios (though none of them are completely satisfactory). First, PHP is processed on the advertiser’s server before the rest of the page is generated and is very fast, leaving little room for conflict or error. The unique click id is essentially sent back to our servers before the rest of the page is processed. Javascript in contrast is processed by the visitor’s browser and can be disabled. It is also processed after the PHP with the rest of the page making it slightly slower and increasing the opportunity for conflict or error.

Which is best? In our opinion both. If utilized correctly, they each offer a different perspective on the quality of traffic for an ad placement. The PHP tracking percentage is generally higher providing the assurance that visitors are reaching the destination that an advertiser intends. The javascript metric on the other hand can suggest problem areas: if the difference between the javascript tracking and the PHP tracking is too large then this could suggest invalid clicks. Utilizing both methods offers a more comprehensive analysis, and the better informed, the better decisions that can be made. We have decided to offer both and leave the final decision to our advertisers.

But – why let advertiser’s block ad placements? Aren’t more clicks better for Copacet? Afterall, the more clicks, the more revenue and profits generated?

Actually it is the exact opposite – fighting invalid clicks aggressively is in Copacet’s best interest and essential for us to maintain a viable business. This is why, in addition to extensively monitoring and blocking invalid and poor performing publisher outlets on our own, we are developing and offering free tools to advertisers so they can monitor their return on investment. These tools help advertisers manage to the bottom line of there ad spend – paying more for quality placements and resulting in more revenue for our publishers.

Have questions? Comments? Feedback or ideas for improvement? Shoot us an email at support [at] copacet.com and let us know what you think!

We get this question often from potential publishers. Net +0 payments means that we pay our invoices the same day that they are generated. We process publisher invoices on the first business day of the month for the month prior. This means that if May 1st is a business day, publisher revenue generated in April will be processed and paid on May 1st.

Ad networks commonly offer Net +30 and Net  +60 payment terms, meaning that publishers will receive revenue payments either 30 days or 60 days (respectively) after the close of the billing cycle, usually the end of a calendar month. This results in longer cash cycles and a delay in putting your capital back to work. This can make a significant difference in the rate of growth.

For example, if you have advertising capital of $6,000 and you are receiving payments on a net +30 basis, you have an advertising budget of $100 per day. For simplicity, let’s assume that you make 100% on your advertising budget ($2 revenue is generated for every $1 in advertising). At the end of 60 days you will receive the revenue generated during the first 30 days of your advertising budget, which in our example is $6,000. This money is available for the next 30 days of advertising at $200 per day. At the end of 60 days you will receive the revenue generated in the last 30 days of your original investment and can continue spending $200 in advertising. The graph looks something like this:

In contrast, net +0 payments allow you to invest your $6,000 at $200 in advertising per day. Using the same assumptions as the net +30 scenario, this results in $400 in revenue generated per day. At the end of 30 days, invoices are processed and all your revenue is available for re-investment in advertising for the next 30 days at $400 per day. The results look something like this:

   In comparison, your $6,000 initial capital results in $12,000 cumulative revenue for net +30 payments, while net +0 payments result in $36,000 cumulative revenue – three times the amount of net +30!

Net +0 is a win for Copacet publishers – and just another example of our commitment to seeing our publishers succeed.

Still have questions? Don’t hesitate to reach out and let us know!

Why wait when everyone is asking for them?

The reason is twofold: 1) we are committed to offering the best publishers the best opportunity for revenue generation, and 2) there are several networks that do banners very well.

When it comes down to it, it is very difficult to compete against Adsense with banner formats. Our goal is to offer more value to our partners in every area we can, and until we can do so with banners – be it through competitive performance and higher revenue or something that no one has thought of yet – we are going to wait.

Another thing that we are trying to do is to make our ads ‘variable-free’ for publishers; well, as variable-free as we can make them. High revenue needs quality traffic, that is a given. But after traffic quality is established, we want to reduce the remaining variables as much as possible: no need to test placements, colors, or layout – placing our ad code will always deliver a well tested and high paying package. Our popunders and prerolls are the first examples of this.

This type of model also serves to protect our advertisers – it removes the risk and encourages best publishing practices. We assume the risk ourselves and carefully monitor our network to ensure that only the best publishers are running our ads: we effectively reduce the opportunity for fraud, but if a publisher attempts to cheat the system, Copacet bears the burden.

All in all, we feel this is a good direction for our network; but to be quite honest, we have no idea how all of this will eventually turn out; but we are keeping our focus on the best opportunities for the best publishers.

Have a comment or a question? Engage us on our forums: support.copacet.com

Over the past several weeks and countless hours spent testing and tweaking, I have asked myself this way too many times. And the answer has always been an easy yes.

An easy yes? Well… yes. =) Given the limitations and bugs in the old platform, and our commitment to our publishers, there really was no alternative.

A little background: when we started Copacet, we were convinced that a custom platform was the way to go and we started building one. But after several weeks of brainstorming and writing code, we decided that it might be easier and better to lease one of the numerous existing – and tested – platforms. We thoroughly vetted several products and initiated trials on several platforms, finally choosing to work with a particular company – a platform with a good reputation, an API, and both affordable and scalable. The next several weeks found us customizing ad code and the optimization functions, getting everything ready to go for an opening in mid Oct. 2011.

After several weeks things were going very well and as expected.Then we decided to run our Preroll beta test and started running into problems. To make a long story short, our ad code and optimzation scheme exposed a reporting bug in the platform we were using: for every 1 impression delivered, 3 impressions were being recorded. After two weeks of trying to find the error in our code, the company we were leasing the platform from acknowledged a bug in their system. A glitch, but no ‘real’ problem – they had the resources and incentive to get things fixed as quickly as possible; and we felt confident that this is what would happen. Their customer support suggested as much when they indicated that the problem would be fixed in the next product update.

Much to our chagrin – and to the disappointment of Copacet partners anticipating the release of our preroll – this didn’t happen. After 4 or 5 additional patches and hot-fixes, and 6 weeks later, the problem was still occurring. It was clear to me that the decision to either move forward with something else or to continue to trust the company that we were working with had to be made. However well intentioned, the company we were working with did not value our publishing partners as much as we did. We needed the ability to respond quickly to the needs or our partners and relying on another company for our infrastructure was just not going to work very well. This is when we decided to move ahead with our own proprietary reporting platform and we haven’t looked back.

The company we were using for our platform will remain un-named. Customer support was good, and we gave them the benefit of the doubt, but the problem went on for far too long. To say the least, I was surprised and dis-appointed – this is a multi-million dollar company with several very large clients and a good reputation; problems happen, but this situation should not have played out as it did.

The relationship with our partners is very important to us, and in the end this was the deciding factor. We want to provide the best service and experience to our partners and with our own platform we can kick it up a notch. Expect more from Copacet.

The last couple of months have seen us busy working on, testing and tweaking our new platform. As with almost every large coding project, what we wanted to create ended up being much more challenging then we initially anticipated: feature implementation was postponed or omitted, and deadlines still came and went, but we finally got it done. This process forced us to look at the most critical aspects of our platform and trim it down to the essentials.

What does all of this mean? We think that the final result is a sleek and well delivered package, and we hope our partners will agree. We have simplified the interface and reporting functions, implemented a support ticket system, and re-configured our ad code system. In the end, all that matters is that our partners are able to find and use the information they need as efficiently and effectively as possible.

We want to be the publisher’s network. What does this mean? The Copacet network is dedicated providing the best publishers with the best opportunities and tools for maximizing their revenue. We are not completely sure what this will end up looking like, but we are committed to finding out. If you have been with us for awhile, you have seen a lot of change. We intend on remaining agile and responsive to the needs of our partners and a fast changing marketplace. Here are some of the ways that we have recently attempted to make our goal of being a publisher’s network a reality:

• Fast payments
• As in Net +0 fast payments. As a publisher, reducing your cash cycle means reduced risk, faster growth and more profits. Getting revenue back to our publishers as fast as we can helps ensure that our publisher’s interests are
• Fixed Rate RPM
• Effective revenue per thousand impressions (eRPM) is the comparative revenue standard for publishers. Ads traditionally pay by impressions, clicks, sales, or actions – this reduces the risk for advertisers, but increases the risk for publishers. Online advertising is rife with fraud, and advertisers are justified in protecting their investments and minimizing risk by correlating payout to publisher performance. But publishers investing in quality traffic and intent on providing a premium service should not have to suffer the indiscretions of fraudulent publishers. By assuming this risk ourselves and offering competitive fixed rate RPM payouts, we effectively reduce risk to our publishers, guaranteeing quality traffic results in quality revenue – the best payouts for the best publishers.
•     Ads that work
• We are concentrating on providing a complete ad solution by eliminating as many variables as possible in an ad delivery format. This requires innovation, exploration, and a lot of creativity. The first two examples of this are our popunder and preroll ad types – though not necessarily innovative or groundbreaking in themselves, this is the pattern that we intend to follow. Ads that work for our publishing partners are ad formats that we design, run tests on, optimize, and result in a high payout. Publishers simply generate ad code, place it on their products, and collect revenue.

Copacet – game ads par excellence. Join the conversation and try us out.