More AdGenta Details

I started a post about AdGenta yesterday, but ended up talking more about Qumana. AdGenta is a relatively new advertising network, that especially targets blogs, but can technically be used on any site (once you dig around to see how). I’ve surfed around some more on AdGenta.com, and have the following initial thoughts.

AdGenta Does Not Serve Contextual Ads
This means that technically you may be able to serve AdGenta ads side by side with AdSense ads (make your own interpretation of AdSense terms). Despite looking like text based ads, they are actually an image generated dynamically by AdGenta servers based on keywords you provide. The ad code drops in a regular “a” tag with a long href (account name, keywords, ad size, color, etc.)

Weak Sign-up Process
There is no approval process per se. There are 2 email confirmation steps to verify that you are who you type in you are. If this was a contextual based system, I could see this approach. Since the publisher gets to pick their own keywords though, I would have expected an approval process more like a CPM based network. As an advertiser I might be concerned about who was running my keywords on their site.

Qumana is Really Not Necessary
AdGenta hedges on their site that you need Qumana to insert their codes, however one quick run at the advertising banner designer leads you to a page (that you could bookmark), that creates the necessary HTML to drop into any of your posts or pages. You can set color, keywords, size… the whole gamut. It was nice to stumble on to this piece of information as I used Qumana for one afternoon and decided to can it (another post, another day).

So, I am on going to fire up a few AdGenta ads to check on consistency of how timely the ads are served, relevance, and revenue performance. I hope to summarize this data in a few weeks.

Free Website Statistics From Google

Yet again Google has jumped to the front of the line in a service they offer. With Google Analytics webmasters can get detailed statistics about web traffic with a simple Javascript include in the header section of their pages. In the case of most of my dynamic sites, this was accomplished by simple placing this Javascript include in a single file. The truly wild fact about this service is that they used to charge a nice chunk of change for it before the decision to give it away for free. They may have a plan for introducing value add services for a fee in the future, but the free data now is quite nice.

It was slow getting initial traffic reports at first (I started using this during the initial crunch of new users), but after a few days of data, I find it well worth the initial wait. Data, data, data… from a variety of perspectives. You can view data from an executive’s perspective, a webmaster, or a marketing perspective.
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New Blog Ad Network?

I recently ran across an advertising network that is definitely trying a direct sell to bloggers. AdGenta is a relatively new advertising network that specifically targets bloggers. At first glance, it seems like a good fit with the blog world. After further digging though, it appears that “out of the box”, AdGenta is really only targeted to bloggers using Qumana software.

Qumana bills itself as being for “experienced bloggers who want maximum freedom in their blogging life — the freedom to post to multiple blogs and blog platforms, and the freedom to make money from advertising with no restrictions.” A cursory search of the Internet makes me at least want to try out Qumana. I’ve seen both negative and positive posts about it, which to me means it’s worth at least a look.
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