How to run a successful ad platform

And how it benefits BLADE users with higher ADB rewards!

What makes a successful ad platform? First and foremost, an ad platform is a marketplace that connects advertisers with interested consumers. Having plentiful advertisers and high quality and high quantity traffic to sell them makes the marketplace run. The exact numbers can vary depending on the niche an ad network is focused on, but there are a few key factors that any ad network needs in order to be successful.

What’s better is that with adbank, a successful ad platform also benefits BLADE users with higher rewards. In this blog post Narcis Bejtic, adbank’s Operations Lead explains how it all works — and how you get bigger rewards.

The Software/Platform

All good ad platforms have to have a software or platform that can run and host the ads for both advertisers and publishers. While many platforms may try to focus on fancy tech, the key for platforms is their capability to display ads consistently and have anti-fraud software integrated into the platform. One of the highest concerns for advertisers in the ad tech industry is avoiding ad fraud. In addition to this, the platform must be able to accurately track impressions, clicks and conversions, as well as have the ability to detect and mitigate fraudulent traffic.

The adbank ad platform is a revolutionary ad platform built on the blockchain. The core goal of adbank is to mitigate ad fraud so we can provide high quality traffic to our advertisers in a transparent blockchain-based system. Ready to switch to the future of advertising? Try it out today!

Traffic

Traffic is the lifeblood of any ad platform — it is what’s being sold to advertisers in the marketplace. There are two indicators to look at when assessing traffic: quantity and quality. Quantity is the obvious one. All successful ad platforms need to be able to provide high amounts of traffic to their advertisers. Working with high traffic publishers is generally the key to this. However, what’s important to note is just because traffic volume is high, it doesn’t mean the traffic is high quality.

“Don’t get tricked into spending your advertising budget on low quality traffic — request data on previous campaign performance to make sure that it’s not just bots.” — Narcis Bejtic, Operations Lead

Many ad platforms will pump out high volume traffic — sometimes by purchasing traffic from bot farms! — but they are only meeting one metric of good traffic. If the traffic doesn’t provide any benefit to the advertiser, then it’s useless (eg. low quality). For example, an advertiser might receive 100,000 impressions with 10 clicks and zero conversions — This is bad traffic. An advertiser that receives just 50,000 impressions but 100 clicks and 10 conversions would be getting a better deal, despite the volume of the traffic being lower. In the next section we’ll look at how results are tracked and calculated.

Analytics

Speaking of quality traffic, let’s take a deeper dive in to what makes up high quality traffic. Volume of traffic is still important — The more eyes that see an ad, the better. However, the three key analytics that break down high quality traffic are click through rates, cost per click, and conversions. Let’s take a look at these individually:

Click through rates (CTR):

CTR is a measurement used to calculate how many clicks a campaign received compared to its number of views. The higher the views, the higher the clicks should be. For example, 100,000 impressions and 5 clicks is not good. However 100,000 impressions and 500 clicks is very impressive.

CTR can vary depending on the targeting of the ads, the product being advertised and placement — there is no standard CTR across all markets, but the higher the better.

Cost per click (CPC):

CPC is used to measure what the advertisers cost would have been per click based on the number of clicks they received and the amount they paid for the campaign. The calculation is: (amount paid for the campaign) ÷ (number of clicks received) = CPC.

Based on the CPC, an advertiser can calculate how effective their campaign was. The CPC can vary widely based on the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). For example, a CPC of $20.00 would be great for a crypto gambling site who on average has each of their users spend $100.00/month. The CAC is below the amount that the new user spends on the site, so that $20 was money well spent.

Conversions:

This one is simple — conversions are how many clicks are converted over to users, registrations, acquisitions, sales, etc. The metric on what counts as a conversion is determined by the advertiser. Some advertisers are looking to sign up users to a mailing list, some want to drive sales of a product, some may want to push users to download a software, etc. Conversions are arguably the most important indicator to an advertiser because it provides real value (ROI) of their ad spend.

At the end of the day, these three metrics (CTR, CPC and conversions) are the most important to any advertiser on an ad platform because it provides them with real value on their marketing spend. If the ad platform’s traffic is poor, and a campaign is not providing value to an advertiser, then those advertisers will not want to use that ad platform. This also drives down the CPM (Cost Per Mille/Thousand) that the ad platform can charge for their traffic because it is of low quality.

What does this mean for BLADE users?

With BLADE, our goal is to provide high quality traffic to our advertisers in order to onboard and renew companies, pushing greater BLADE adoption in the ad tech space. Higher quality traffic leads to more advertisers, which leads to increased CPM prices, which leads to more ADB rewards for our users!

With a fully stable ecosystem that provides high value to everyone involved, BLADE is the first of its kind in the online advertising space.

• Advertisers get fraud free, high quality views
• Users get high rewards and privacy-respecting ads
• Publishers even get rewarded automatically!

Ready to start using BLADE? Users can download and use BLADE at blade.software. Advertisers can contact the team at blade@adbank.network to start advertising.

Don’t forget to join our Telegram channel here to meet the team, ask questions, and stay up to date on the project.