Sponsoring ActiveRain allows you to get your message out to a targeted audience using on ActiveRain.com and employs an auction based bidding system to determine the price per 1,000 impressions of advertising.

The Basics

  • Advertising Campaigns: An advertising campaign consists of your ad and one more targeting/bid combinations that determine how the advertising campaigns budget will be spent.
  • Targeting: For each advertising campaign you can choose one or more targeting areas and bid on the maximum amount you're willing to pay per 1,000 impressions (CPM). You can target specific pages on our site, specific user groups, members or non-members, regional areas (state, county, city), or all users on all pages.
  • Bids: We use an auction based system combined with some change to determine if your ad is shown. To display an ad we select the top 50 ads that meet the targeting requirements for the current page, then sort them by bid price (then by when they were created to sort equal bid prices). We then use a simple weighted random number algorithm where the top bid has a weight of 50 and the bottom bid has a weight of 1. We take the top number of bids (usually 2-3 ads) and bill the advertising campaigns displayed the lowest bid that made the selection. Example: We pick 3 ads that have bids of $3, $2, and $1 per 1,000 impressions. Each advertising campaign would be billed $1/1000 for the impression. When placing your bid we show you the current high bid.

Other things of note:

  • The minimum campaign budget is $10
  • You can choose to have your ad displayed only 5 times to a particular user session or choose to have it be unlimited (default is limited)
  • You can stop/start your ad at anytime and update your bids whenever you wish.

Coming soon:

  • Much more robust statistical/reporting display
  • Simpler system that helps you determine the lowest winning bid for your ad and to model various targeting options
  • Estimates on about how long your ad will display given your current budget
  • Cleaner design for the ad campaign wizard
  • Alerts when your budget is getting low (possibly user set) and/or daily status emails about how your campaign is doing.