DynAds and affiliate marketing

Many websites rely on advertising and affiliate commissions to make money and survive. If done correctly, pay per sale affiliate programs are great to make steady income from your website. However, there are reports that only small percentage of affiliates are doing a good job, and the rest is failing to generate sufficient income. No, this page is not about how to be a successful affiliate in ten minutes! But, it is about how our CGI softwares can help you to succeed.

DynAds is a Perl CGI script for general purpose content delivery, rotation, tracking and reporting.

Among many unique features and applications, the followings are especially useful for websites participated in affiliate programs.

Affiliate Ad rotation

Problem: How do you rotate the affiliate ads? Rotation is necessary, if there are more ads than the number of ad space you have, or you want an ad displayed on different pages for equal exposure. Considering that affiliate ad codes are special piece of codes, including many HTML elements, you can not just use a conventional banner rotator.

Solution: Since DynAds family of scripts are general purpose content rotators, they can rotate any kind of affiliate ads with no problem. With DynAds family of scripts, you can even mix ad codes from different affiliate networks. Besides that, you can use any server side (such as SSI, PHP) or browser side (such as IMG, IFRAME, Java Script) ad rotation methods. There is no limit on the number of ads and the number of rotations.

Centralized Ad Management

Problem: Affiliate merchants create new banner ads all the time. Some products you advertise go out of stock, and you want to remove them. You switch to a new merchant and want to replace the ads. You want to try other banners of a merchant... The end result is that you find yourself changing the affiliate ads on your site very often. Experienced webmasters would admit that, even with a small number of affiliate programs, and for a medium sized website, updating the affiliate ads on each page is a painful process.

Solution: DynAds family of scripts come with a password protected web control panel where you can manage the ads and rotations in the database. Once you place a rotation code on your website pages, you can do all the changes via the web interface. The changes go live instantly. It is very easy and convenient.

Ad Impression and Click Through Tracking

Problem: You should measure the efficiency of the ads on your site to find out which ads are effectively bringing commissions and which ads are not. If you know you sent considerable amount of clicks to a merchant and they resulted in only very few sales, then you would not want to continue promoting that program. Some of the big third party affiliate networks can report you the number of times a particular ad is displayed and the number of clicks it gets from your site, along with the commissions earned. However, some affiliate programs do not report such details.

Solution: DynAds scripts record every view of the ads and clicks to to the links. With every record, the date/time of the event, the name of the ad, the name of the zone (rotation), the IP of the visitor, the referrer URL of the visitor, and the user agent of the visitor are also saved. DynAds scripts can report very detailed reports about the ads. You can easily identify a poorly performing ad or merchant and eliminate them. In addition, you can cross check your statistics with the one merchant or affiliate network reports.

Hide Affiliate Links and Affiliate ID in Links

Problem: It has been observed that the considerable amount of visitors do not click to links if they see an affiliate ID like pattern in the link query string. Instead, they type the destination page in their browser, without the affiliate ID, resulting in lost commission.

Solution: By using DynAds scripts to deliver the ads in auto-redirection mode, the destination URL of the ad is replaced by a tracking and redirection URL to track the clicks. This effectively hides the actual URL from the visitor. In addition to the auto-redirection mode, if you like, you can create individual tracking URLs for any ad in the database.

Randomized Ad Lists

Problem: Some websites like web directories display a list of ads on a page. It is well known that the ads located at the top have more change to be noticed and clicked. So, there should be a way of rotating the positions of the ads in the list to provide fair exposures.

Solution: DynAds family of scripts have built in support for list operations. You can randomize a given list of ads, shift the list elements randomly, randomly pull the ads from the database, or sequentially select the slice of ads from a larger list.

Display Ads in DHTML Layers

Problem: Internet users are used to banner ads, and they ignore the banners most of the time. Average banner click through ratio is now around 1-2% compared to the 20% of early days. Of course, this situation means less affiliate commissions.

Solution: You can display the affiliate ads in DHTML layers to draw the attention of the visitor to the ads. DynAds family of scripts come with a built in java script DHTML API, with which you can easily implement vertical scrollers, floating, sticky, or moving boxes. In addition, you can use DHTML refreshing to display more then one ads in one location without refreshing the browser.

Besides being a good helper application for affiliates, DynAds family of scripts are great tools for rotating and managing paid advertisement on your sites, for tracking your own advertisements on other sites, for tracking the page views of your website, for tracking the search terms the visitors are using to find your site on search engines, for tracking the keywords on PPC search engines...