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Major Changes to Ad Network

Not more than 3 hours after we launched the ad network Lenn emailed us saying, in effect: if I create 50 campaigns and have to charge my card 50 times the bank will disable it for fraud. Very good point, so we rewrote the financial end of the ad network yesterday.

You now have a Bank which you can use to fund all of your campaigns. Just like a normal bank you can move money in and out of your bank to and from campaigns. You'll notice a My Bank link at the top of the screen when you login to http://ads.activerain.com

The new Bank concept also has an advantage: you no longer need to fund each ad campaign with $10... the budget for an an ad campaign can be as small or large as you want it to be now.

With the new bank concept Jon thought it'd be smart to allow your ad campaigns to auto-deduct from your bank instead of forcing you to set an ad campaign budget. So - this is enabled in the budgeting step when creating/editing an ad campaign.

We've started to ad some stats that you'll see when you login to http://ads.activerain.com as well. We'll be adding more stats in the near future to help users fine tune their ad campaigns.

Bug Notice: There was a major bug in targeting anything other than "All Pages" (thanks Bob for finding this!). Unfortunately we couldn't fix this and preserve the settings you had so we had to delete all targets that weren't All Pages. So - if you tried to set up targeting to specific pages you'll need to redo those targets. Sorry about that!

Formating: We're still trying to get the formating right for ads... so we'll be tweaking this often over the next few days.

Documentation: We're going to try to do extensive documentation on the ad system (hopefully today). We realize it's kind of confusing and are working to make it better.

Localism advertising: We're hoping to get ads running on Localism very soon, it's in the pipeline.

The comments we've been receiving from users have been very helpful... please continue to alert of us of concerns, confusions and especially bugs.

-ben

Posted by ActiveRain Real Estate Network on 08/30/2007 07:05 AM

Comments (26)

ad network

26 Comments on Major Changes to Ad Network

AUG

2007

Ben,

Excellent! I signed up myself last night to try this sponsor program which will bring some "THANK YOU DOLLARS" as I call it to Active Rain and staff. Highly recommend others take advantage of this sponsorship program. Look forward to localism ads as well.

Your Friendly Active Rain Mortgage Man,

Nima

I had noticed the ads but hadn't read up on them. I'll have to go catch up on the news. It's nice to see Active Rain recouping some of their funds. It's about time.

where can I learn more about this ad program? I would be very interested in leraning more about it. Thanks!

The Bank is a great idea - thanks Lenn & guys! So the one campaign I have running -- if I transfer the balance I charged for that campaign to The Bank -- it will keep running with no change? The funds will just be in "The Bank" instead? I don't want to transfer and find out I farkled things up.

I'm planning to use the Localism ads as a way to advertise specific listings .... So I'm eagerly awaitin'!

@Richard: Check the posts on this blog http://activerain.com/blogs/activerain there's also a splash screen that I'm hoping to replace soon with actual documentation http://ads.activerain.com/ads which is already a bit out of date but it covers the basics.

Thanks for the update on the ads. I saw the links you put up on the other post, so will head off to check those out to learn a little more. The localism ads could certainly be intriguing!

Thanks much!
Ann

Grrreat idea. You can take that to the bank!

Now off to retarget.

"I really want to see how this will work out!" He said eagerly.

Leave it to Lenn, thanks. I set up an account yesterday but I have to think of something clever to say in an ad. I'm looking forward to localism ads.

Thanks for the updates and the continued improvements. I'll be anxious to hear what successes people are having.

Jeff

Interesting to see this idea evolve. I'm really impressed with the response of the AR Team on this to improve it for the benefit of the community.

Sounds like a great idea! I'll have to check this out. :)

If I understand all of this correctly, I should wait for Localism ads before I advertise. But when Localism ads do become available, will there be any advantage to folks who are already signed up on an AR ad program? In other words, will I find out later that perhaps I should not have waited?

@Rolando: Unless the team has something planned they haven't told me the addition of Localism should just be additional targeting options. So - waiting is probably a good strategy.

Wait, where and when do the ads appear? i dont see a location except the two spots for the active rain community...

Sounds like good changes! On the Localism ads, will it be for the state, or the city?

i only see ads on the main page, where will the others be located?

I am so far behind... gotta check this all out - thanks for the update

Thanks for the update. I am going to piggyback on this one also and read the posts when all the dust settles.

Thanks Ben.

Very nice. Simple and fast. I was able to fund the "Bank" with monry. Unfortunately, when I tried to transfer money from the Bank to on one of one of the accounts, it didn't work.

Back to the keyboard.

I believe that I found another bug, but I'm still testing.

The Ad Campaign seems to be working well. I had almost 20,000 impressions and several thousand clicks in less than 12 hours! Keep up the good work. At AR's request, I deleted the ad campaign. It was not my wish to delete it, I do as I am asked, it's your site- not mine. I will still, however continue to promote AR on over 50 of my own web pages. That is how I like to do things... Just 'cause I'm "harmed" does not make it right to "harm" others. Hopefully we can get this sorted out.

Thanks

Waterway Realty, Ltd. Co. ~ 305.935.3533

Hey, i cant get my logo up!! ahhhh

Thanks for keeping us up-to-date on this. It's really nice to be kept in the loop. Thanks again!

Well, I've deposited money a few days ago...created an ad...set up (3) different target areas...changed my bid per impression about ten times...and yet, nothing has happened!

Now, I went into reset my target areas, tweak my bids...and the system kicked back an error message.

Ben, you're not making it easy for me to spend money with AR.

Whatthedealio?

James Coogan

GA-agent.com

Thanks for the update and attention to this request so quickly. Just goes to show you guys are really trying to make this a top line blog!

AUG

2007

Keep us all posted. There are always some bugs when a new system gets rolled out. Take care and thanks for always improving the network.

Thanks Ben..............I can't wait to have time to get into this ad thingy................

Duane Hosek in the Black Hills of South Dakota

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