RJM62
Touchdown! Greaser!
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2007
- Messages
- 13,157
- Location
- Upstate New York
- Display Name
Display name:
Geek on the Hill
The Context
In my ongoing quest to find non-intrusive ads that actually generate decent revenue, I recently came across 7search.com. I'd never heard of them before, but apparently they've been around for a while. Here are some of my observations.
The reviews of 7Search on various webmaster boards were mixed. But the good reviews outnumbered the bad ones, and the bad ones seemed to be mainly from users who never had anything good to say about anything. Signup being free, I decided to give 7Search a try on a couple of my sites.
Support and Documentation
I should mention at this point that aside from the terms of service and acceptable site standards (which are what one would expect), both the documentation and the support provided by 7search are meager. There's very little technical guidance provided to publishers, and the one support ticket I submitted (about whether I could remove certain unnecessary style information from their links) was never answered.
On the other hand, the reporting is in real-time; and although it's not very pretty, the publisher dashboard is useful in that it reports both searches and clicks for every single ad unit separately, which is very handy information.
Now, about the ads.
The company provides several different ad formats, of which I have tried two thus far.
Pay Per Text
The first format I tried are monetized text links that open to 7Search's search page. Two actions are required for payment: The user must first click the link on the publisher's site (a "search"), and then must click a link on the search page (that's a revenue "click").
The links are created using the publisher's defined key words and phrases. During the creation process, 7Search displays other suggestions, as well as the average RPC range for all the terms. The publisher makes the final decision as to which keywords and phrases to use by checking off boxes. The only annoying thing is that the links contain style information that is unnecessary and conflicts slightly with my stylesheets. I'm almost certain that I could remove it without affecting tracking or revenue, but the company hasn't responded to my ticket asking them about it.
Accessory Ads
The second format I started trying a few minutes ago. They call it "Accessory Ads." The ads look a lot like Adsense ads, except that they refresh every so often (maybe every 30 seconds -- I didn't actually time it) using a vertical wipe. They also allow color customization and so forth, and the effect is actually rather pleasing aesthetically -- as ads go, anyway.
As far as I can tell, the Accessory Ads are neither contextual nor determined by user history. The publisher has to manually enter the desired keywords and/or key phrases when he or she creates the ad unit, and the ads are instantly relevant to those selections from the first time they're rendered. That perked me up, for reasons I've gone into ad nauseum on other posts.
If the Accessory Ads perform, I'll probably use them in place of Adsense on sites that haven't been approved for Yahoo / Bing.
As for revenue...
The text ads starting generating revenue almost immediately. But the revenue pattern has been a little surprising.
I started by creating two sets of text ads: one set for a site that gets lots of traffic, and another set for a site that gets very little traffic. Both sets of text links started generating revenue on the first day, but the set that I placed on the low-traffic site generated more than triple the revenue of the set on the high-traffic site. Odd.
Perhaps even odder, but certainly a nice oddity, is that the text ads on the low-traffic site exceeded the combined revenue from all the other ads on that site (Adsense, Amazon, and affiliate ads) except for a couple of fixed-rate, privately placed ads -- and at the current revenue rate, they'll likely exceed those, too, by the end of the month.
I was impressed enough with that performance that I created an "Accessory Ad" and placed it in the left column with the Adsense unit this morning, replacing the Amazon unit (which was performing poorly on that site, anyway). I'm going to keep an eye on the revenue from both programs for the next month or so.
In my judgments, putting both ads on the same page is not a violation of Google's TOS because 7Search's ads are not "contextual," as far as I'm concerned, because I defined the keywords and phrases. Besides, I really don't give a rat's hindquarters if Google objects. Considering my general disdain for Google and the fact that 7Search is outperforming Adsense, guess whose ads would get yanked if they have any gripes?
Conclusion is Still Pending
The next thing to observe will be how well 7Search makes their payments, and whether they start playing "invalid click" games when it's time to pay up. Assuming that they're honest and make their payments promptly, I think I've found a nice alternative to Adsense, revenue from which has been ever-dwindling of late.
-Rich
In my ongoing quest to find non-intrusive ads that actually generate decent revenue, I recently came across 7search.com. I'd never heard of them before, but apparently they've been around for a while. Here are some of my observations.
The reviews of 7Search on various webmaster boards were mixed. But the good reviews outnumbered the bad ones, and the bad ones seemed to be mainly from users who never had anything good to say about anything. Signup being free, I decided to give 7Search a try on a couple of my sites.
Support and Documentation
I should mention at this point that aside from the terms of service and acceptable site standards (which are what one would expect), both the documentation and the support provided by 7search are meager. There's very little technical guidance provided to publishers, and the one support ticket I submitted (about whether I could remove certain unnecessary style information from their links) was never answered.
On the other hand, the reporting is in real-time; and although it's not very pretty, the publisher dashboard is useful in that it reports both searches and clicks for every single ad unit separately, which is very handy information.
Now, about the ads.
The company provides several different ad formats, of which I have tried two thus far.
Pay Per Text
The first format I tried are monetized text links that open to 7Search's search page. Two actions are required for payment: The user must first click the link on the publisher's site (a "search"), and then must click a link on the search page (that's a revenue "click").
The links are created using the publisher's defined key words and phrases. During the creation process, 7Search displays other suggestions, as well as the average RPC range for all the terms. The publisher makes the final decision as to which keywords and phrases to use by checking off boxes. The only annoying thing is that the links contain style information that is unnecessary and conflicts slightly with my stylesheets. I'm almost certain that I could remove it without affecting tracking or revenue, but the company hasn't responded to my ticket asking them about it.
Accessory Ads
The second format I started trying a few minutes ago. They call it "Accessory Ads." The ads look a lot like Adsense ads, except that they refresh every so often (maybe every 30 seconds -- I didn't actually time it) using a vertical wipe. They also allow color customization and so forth, and the effect is actually rather pleasing aesthetically -- as ads go, anyway.
As far as I can tell, the Accessory Ads are neither contextual nor determined by user history. The publisher has to manually enter the desired keywords and/or key phrases when he or she creates the ad unit, and the ads are instantly relevant to those selections from the first time they're rendered. That perked me up, for reasons I've gone into ad nauseum on other posts.
If the Accessory Ads perform, I'll probably use them in place of Adsense on sites that haven't been approved for Yahoo / Bing.
As for revenue...
The text ads starting generating revenue almost immediately. But the revenue pattern has been a little surprising.
I started by creating two sets of text ads: one set for a site that gets lots of traffic, and another set for a site that gets very little traffic. Both sets of text links started generating revenue on the first day, but the set that I placed on the low-traffic site generated more than triple the revenue of the set on the high-traffic site. Odd.
Perhaps even odder, but certainly a nice oddity, is that the text ads on the low-traffic site exceeded the combined revenue from all the other ads on that site (Adsense, Amazon, and affiliate ads) except for a couple of fixed-rate, privately placed ads -- and at the current revenue rate, they'll likely exceed those, too, by the end of the month.
I was impressed enough with that performance that I created an "Accessory Ad" and placed it in the left column with the Adsense unit this morning, replacing the Amazon unit (which was performing poorly on that site, anyway). I'm going to keep an eye on the revenue from both programs for the next month or so.
In my judgments, putting both ads on the same page is not a violation of Google's TOS because 7Search's ads are not "contextual," as far as I'm concerned, because I defined the keywords and phrases. Besides, I really don't give a rat's hindquarters if Google objects. Considering my general disdain for Google and the fact that 7Search is outperforming Adsense, guess whose ads would get yanked if they have any gripes?
Conclusion is Still Pending
The next thing to observe will be how well 7Search makes their payments, and whether they start playing "invalid click" games when it's time to pay up. Assuming that they're honest and make their payments promptly, I think I've found a nice alternative to Adsense, revenue from which has been ever-dwindling of late.
-Rich
Last edited:
