Kontera’s In-text Advertising Reviewed
I’ve been using Kontera for a few weeks now, and I have to say that I’m not pleased with it. Kontera is a contextual advertising service that highlights keywords on your webpage and links them to advertisers. Hovering over a contextual link provides a popup with a quick blurb.
Installation is easy - just add a javascript to any page that you want to hold the content, and you’re golden.
My biggest problem? Deceptive statistics. We know Apache logs are flawed because they can’t tell robots from people, and we know javascript logs are flawed because they miss people with javascript turned off or adBlock.
Since Kontera and Statcounter are both javascripts, they should return approximately the same number of impressions. Right? Apparently not - for the same period of time, Kontera received 872 impressions, and Statcounter had 1,818. Somehow I lost 52% of my page impressions in Kontera’s count. Does it just not load for some people? What’s going on here? If someone could explain this discrepancy, I would greatly appreciate it.
Beyond that, how profitable was Kontera? According to their statistics, I had a CTR of 1.26%, 11 clicks, and a revenue of $1.30 (about $.12 per click). This amounted to an increase of $1.49 CPM overall, since it doesn’t interfere with advertising.
However, taking into account the actual impressions, CPM only increased only by $.72, which isn’t worth the time it takes to load.
Add to that the fact that there is no automated process for adding additional sites to your account (you have to email them), it just seems like too much hassle for too little gain. However, it doesn’t conflict with other forms of advertising, so if you’re looking to squeeze out every buck out of your site, this may be just what you need.
Goodbye Kontera!
Update Monday, May 14, 2007: I just received a reply back from support about my issue - total response time: 35 hours, 37 minutes. That’s already much better than most companies, but that includes weekend time. Business hours: 3 hours, 21 minutes. Not only that, but the person that responded to my e-mail, David, had already taken the time to look at my site and see if there were any obvious issues and suggested several possibilities. A+ so far for customer service.
I’ve put Kontera back up temporarily to see if we can find what the cause of this may be. Roman commented (below) that the impressions are ones where the ads actually ran (”prods”) which can vary depending on page content, page length, geo-location, OS, browser, etc. Since I’ve noted it sometimes takes a few seconds for the highlighting function to run (page has to load fully), it may be that certain groups of people who only visit for a few seconds (Digg, StumbleUpon) are mostly ‘lost’. Another possibility is that a sizeable portion of my audience is using AdBlock.
Additionally, David informed me that they are currently working on an automated system for submitting additional sites, which I’m looking forward to using for additional sites later on.
