How isocket Powers Premium Ad Sales

This is part 3 of a 4 post series about direct sales and web display ads. Many website owners are benefiting from or considering selling ads on their sites directly. But direct sales can be confusing and it isn’t right for everyone. The posts:

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Selling Your Own Ads Is Tough

So selling your own premium advertising can be a great thing. But going at it alone can be very difficult – conducting direct sales as a publisher is a time consuming mess. It’s very manual – emails back and forth, invoices, etc.

On average, publishers who are trying direct sales spend up to half their time on the administrative overhead behind ad sales, or the “nuts and bolts”. One of our beta testers described his daily routine as “hand to hand combat.”

We’re one of the new tools that makes the processes easier and quicker. Plus we’re the only one that is commission free and built for flexibility and customization.

Outbound Direct Sales vs Inbound Self Service

There are two ways premium ads get bought and sold. One is outbound direct sales, where the seller is actively trying to push his inventory by pitching to potential buyers “you should buy ads on my website!” The other is inbound self service, where a buyer initiates the purchase by coming to the seller and saying “I’d like to advertise on your site!”

Let’s take a look at a typical inbound scenario:

Buyer is browsing a website and is interested in advertising on it.
Buyer goes to the “advertise page”, such as xyz.com/advertise.
The advertise page tells the buyer that they need to email advertise@xyz.com for more info.
There’s a back and forth of emails where the buyer is asking questions, trying to figure out what is available to buy, the price, etc.
Buyer and seller agree on a deal. Seller creates an invoice for the buyer and emails it to them. Buyer sends payment via check, PayPal, etc.
Buyer emails their banner ad to seller. Seller takes the file and puts it into their ad server, manually creating a campaign based on what the buyer wanted.
The ad runs. The buyer can’t see what’s happening or change their banner image, so they email the seller to see how much of their order has been filled.
The seller emails a report to the buyer once the campaign is done.

That doesn’t sound like much fun. It’s a very tedious, time consuming, manual processes simply to sell a banner ad. Lots of independent moving pieces and things that have to be kept track of. Think about it – an ad buyer has to jump through hoops to give you money that they wanted to spend on you!

isocket Makes It Easier

Rather than tell you what we’re doing, we thought it’d be better to show you! Here’s the first public look inside isocket (a 4:45 video screencast).

Here’s some of the key features highlighted in the screencast:

More options – isocket helps you sell any kind of ad inventory, including web display banners, email and RSS.

More control – Create your ad inventory the way you want to – you can set the price, duration, details, etc.

More money – Why are you still paying 30% commissions? isocket charges a low monthly fee. On average, publishers that switch to isocket are saving up to $1,000 per month!

More transparency – Because we’re commission free, we don’t try to hide who you’re selling to or buying from.

What Do You Think?

Our goal is to build you the best ad platform around! The best way to do that is by listening to you. Tell us what you think of the sneak peak into isocket or what features you would love to see! You can also connect with us on twitter.

May 4 | Filed Under Advertising, Beta, Features

3 Comments

Comments

3 Responses to “How isocket Powers Premium Ad Sales”

Seb on May 25th, 2009 9:52 pm

This thing about having AdSense code get replaced by isocket code and be used by isocket in general… they let you do that according to Google’s and AdSense’s terms and conditions?

I doubt that Google would let this happen, but who knows… you do have 2 people from Google working for you I believe
John Ramey on May 25th, 2009 9:58 pm

Hey Seb – great question.

Google wants their AdSense code to show up in as many places as possible, since they only get paid when a click happens. More Google ads = more Google clicks = more money for Google.

The ad network optimizers, like PubMatic, Rubicon and YieldBuild essentially do the same thing, and Google doesn’t mind.

Since we’re not modifying Google’s code or interfering in any way, we’re just a delivery method. No real issues there.

And yes, we’re proud to have some very talented ex-Googlers on our side, including the man who was in charge of AdSense.

Thanks!
DentNEWS on August 27th, 2009 12:39 pm

I think isocket is the next big thing in web advertising.

I was trying till now to sell ads directly, which eventually turned out to be effortless…

Just yesterday i put some adsense code from google. I didn’t want to have google adsense thinking it was something that is screwing up my website point of view.

I believe that isocket is taking web-ads many steps further.

p.s. really liked the sneak-peak video