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.
Glen
wrote @ 11:26 am on May 12, 2007:I actually have real good money coming in from these guys. Money wise might depend what your content is about but I am seeing over 3 bucks additional CPM to my Adsense and banners. Good article and overview in any case
Mike Bogo
wrote @ 12:13 pm on May 12, 2007:Glen,
$3 extra per CPM is a nice addition. You may be right, people reading tech content tend to be very ad-blind. Perhaps trying this service on a different sector might provide better results.
Have you noticed the same difference in page views and the impressions from Kontera? Perhaps people have adblocked Kontera, but that still seems like a high percentage even for techies.
Roman
wrote @ 2:12 pm on May 12, 2007:Hey Mike
Just read your post, seems kind of odd if you ask me. I have these guys running on several websites and am making some good money. I have actually gotten to know one of their account managers prety well through him managing my account. I had the same issue you did with the weird PV disrecpancy, he explained to me that the impressions you see are what are called “prod” impressions which are when their engine can actually highlight one word or more and not just make the call to the JavaScript (which is the impression you are seeing mostly everywhere else). As I recall it depends on the geo locations, the OS, the browser and several other variables from user to user that may prohibit the ads from showing, he told me it is within 10% of your real PVs. Also
not sure if you gave it a few weeks or not, but they have this thing called an initial optmization which makes your pages load faster and after about a week or so increases your cpc per word, as their engine gets to know your site better.
shoot an email to them at i think its support@kontera.com (dboule check) and one of their guys will get in touch with you, they are really good and have been helping me with any issue now for six months.
Roman
Mike Bogo
wrote @ 2:44 pm on May 12, 2007:Roman,
Thanks for the explanation!
Just to make sure there isn’t an issue with my account or something else, I’ve shot them off an email and I’m waiting for a response - my impressions were definitely off by more than 10%.
Since the article, I’ve been hearing good things about the service, so I may be trying it again in the near future in a different niche.
Mukesh
wrote @ 7:44 pm on June 10, 2007:Kontera sucks big time, mainly bcase their advertiser inventory is very small. One reason why their ads are completely unrelated to the content on-page.
These stupid guys simply won’t accept publishers. They hav a thousand ways to turn off publishers from applying.. like the minimum impressions thing. Why is google adsense so popular? Partly cause of their publisher network. So to guys at kontera.. allow more publishers to join, only then advertises will ever look your side.
Vic
wrote @ 10:03 am on July 30, 2007:I am having a mixed feeling about Kontera as soon as i started running Kontera, Adsense started doing smart pricing but i do not know if it is related.
anon
wrote @ 5:21 am on December 21, 2007:IMHO in-text ads are the worst intrusive way of ruining user experience, it is one of the reason javascript is turned off by default.
to me a website who runs that kind of ads is greed motivated, is lightyears from understanding the spirit of the web and is not worth staying or coming back.
These are just cluttering the web for no valuable reason.
Usually I just leave the site but since I just read this: http://alexking.org/blog/2006/12/05/kontera-in-text-ads
I decided to put a comment here just so you know some people are bouncing from your website just because of in-text ads.