Turn, a new cost-per-action (CPA) based ad network, launched yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. They are currently signing on both advertisers and publishers. I signed up for an advertiser account to check out the application, which they’ve launched in beta.
After logging in you are first asked to create a campaign. Creating a campaign involves entering a name for the campaign and choosing a CPA bid and action, including Site Interaction, Lead, Sale, or enter a custom action.
You are also given advanced options while setting your CPA bid giving you the ability to specify a window (number of days in which the visitor has to take action) and choose whether you’d like to limit each visitor to one or unlimited actions.
You can then specify "Special Settings" that includes the date range in which the ad will run, spending cap, and sites that you’d like to exclude to ensure your ad is not shown.
Next, you can upload your ads and choose your ad settings.
These settings include ad type (graphic or text), the URL for the ad, ad name, and ad group.
Finally, you can set your "Beacon" or "Action Tracking" settings. This involves copying the javascript to ad to your website (allowing Turn to track the successful completion of an action) and choosing whether you’ll be adding this script to an encrypted or non-encrypted page.
After launching your campaign you can then login to your account to view the reports. The reporting data includes: impression date, impressions, clicks, click-through rate (CTR), actions, average rank, average CPA, etc… A cool feature here is the ability customize a report (display only the data you’re interested in viewing) and to set a report to run on a recurring basis.
At this point it’s tough to say whether Turn has built a winning advertising network. They are currently in beta and I’d like to have a better understanding of the types of sites that have joined their network (as publishers) thus far, prior to investing. I contacted Turn today to get additional information and haven’t heard back. Once I speak with them and gain a better understanding of the types of sites where our ads will be displayed, I’ll then consider moving forward on giving their network a shot. I’ll keep you posted!
Update:
After asking about the quantity/quality of publishers Turn has signed on thus far, I received the following email from their Director of Client Services, Jason Washing. Jason stated the following:
"As a beta network we are still pretty small. Our reach was 18 million unique last week. We have ~30 different publishers in the network currently that give us access to ~100 different domains on any given day. Publishers range in size from small to very large (Netratings Top 20).
The "blind" nature of the network is a function of the CPA pricing model we employ. Many of the sites that currently make up the network are sites that don’t sell inventory through their own channels on a CPA basis. This is very similar to the blind nature of the Google Ad Sense (Google’s display network for non-search content) network.
During beta we are going to be trying a variety of different domains and publishers as part of our ongoing strategy. As an additional point of reference, please have a look at our Publisher Terms of Service (PTOS) to get a better understanding of what is NOT in the network. The PTOS can be found here: http://www.turn.com/corp/advertisers/ad-distribution.jsp."
Apparently my initial support email did not get through and was lost in the ethers-no fault of Turn. Jason read the blog post and promptly responded. I’m very appreciative of his thorough response to my enquiry and very excited to give their network a try, however I’m going to wait until early January. I’ll keep you guys posted!
