Another story about starting a startup



    The golden rule for developing successful projects is to do what you yourself would use. Like many projects, Adverton grew out of the fact that once the needs of the creators of the project did not coincide with the opportunities offered by the market. Today we will talk about the process of developing and promoting our startup, as well as provide some useful figures from our experience.

    ▌Development


    We started as webmasters. At some point, our business grew to 318 sites, for the monetization of which we were responsible. Testing various advertising networks in turn, we managed to increase their total revenue 2.7 times over 9 months.

    Then we realized that the advertising management process lacked automation. Site owners want to make money on them, but not everyone is willing to spend too much time, understanding the intricacies of various advertising systems and choosing which one will bring more money. Now, if there was a tool that allowed the webmaster to find new ad networks, register, configure, insert advertising codes and compare the results in one window ...

    So we came up with “ Adverton ”.

    The idea to aggregate all possible networks in one place came to us in the spring of 2012, and closer to its end we had already begun its immediate implementation.

    First pancake

    Acquaintance with the topic already as developers has cooled our enthusiasm a bit. Most ad networks do not offer any API and have no plans for its development. The only network that offers the API - and that truncated one - is the Adlabs Medianet.

    Therefore, we began to develop bots (connectors) for users who would register for them and work on advertising network sites. We planned to earn money through referral programs of advertising networks that would deduct us the percentage for users registered through us. For users themselves, our functionality would be free.

    However, this solution was not optimal for a small startup: the interfaces of dozens of advertising networks are significantly different from each other, and setting up connectors for each, and then constantly repairing it, responding to bugs and changes in them, required inappropriately large resources. As a result, planning to launch with 15 networks, we came up with only five to open in November 2013.

    Another option for the development of this idea was the creation of a megonnector, i.e. one superuser in each ad network through which the management of the accounts of our users would go. This would simplify the process of logging, but at the same time all the difficulties of managing user accounts remained, and responsibility for financial settlements with users was added, including all the risks - whether the ad network delays the payment to the webmaster or blocks its account - we are the last ones.

    Having realized that we won’t be able to build a correctly working service in this way, we refused to use connectors. Perhaps we will return to this idea in the future, but by revising the approach:

    • firstly, based on statistics, we will determine which networks are most demanded by our users and offer them to manage their accounts through AdvertOne using their username and password.
    • secondly, we hope that market requirements will lead ad networks to the decision to develop their APIs.

    In the meantime, we have focused on functionality for placing advertisements of different networks in one container.

    Launch

    By February 2014, the number of Adverton-supported ad networks grew to 26, including not only teaser networks, but also Google Adsence and Yandex.Direct.

    Along the way, we resolved a number of technical issues related to the need to make the codes of various systems work correctly in one advertising container.

    For example, the scripts of many ad networks still use synchronous code. The glitch of one of them could lead to the suspension of the entire page. We found a solution for asynchronously loading the code of an advertising container containing JS scripts, which can be either asynchronous or synchronous. If interested, we will write more about this in the following posts.

    Now we offer our users to register with them and generate an ad code on their own, and then post it through “Adverton” on their website. The main advantage of using our system is the ability to correctly A / B-test the effectiveness of various advertising networks. The problem of choosing the most profitable network is that it is difficult to achieve ideal conditions for comparison, because the results of the promotion of advertising are affected by the time of display, and the location and quantity.

    Placing advertisements of different networks in one advertising container through AdvertOne is now the easiest and most accurate way to analyze. The number of ad impressions in equal shares is distributed between all connected networks in one ad unit, which allows us to identify the leader in terms of profitability for a particular resource by the amount of earned funds.

    ▌ Promotion


    Having started, we faced the most important task of all startups - to tell the target audience about themselves. We didn’t immediately come to Habr :-), but started by looking for our users among the audience of blogs about SEO and monetization. We have a list of publications on the About Project page .

    We are ready to share some results, because we think that our experience in this case will be useful for other projects working in the field of online advertising.

    The blog
    Unique for a month
    maulnet.ru
    218
    kurilo.pro
    114
    asbseo.ru
    55
    designfire.ru
    4
    wildo.ru
    169
    wpnew.ru
    23
    vovka.su
    24
    delexp.net
    67
    sidash.ru
    8
    cyber-promo.ru
    12
    billznaet.ru
    54
    altblog.ru
    21
    bormaley.com
    12
    blog.dimok.ru
    19
    www.seofive.ru
    5
    vk.com/typ_web
    28
    vk.com/web_faq
    7
    www.seonews.ru
    133
    habrahabr.ru
    1046
    Total:
    2019


    Although the data for most blogs was collected for the month, the main traffic from them went on the day of publication and the next 2-3 days, then falling to insignificant values. Predictably the most powerful source of traffic turned out to be Habr. "Tail" from the publication on Habré is also longer - transitions from it went a week after our first post .

    In parallel, we launched banner ads on a number of thematic sites and forums:

    Banner advertising
    Website
    Accommodation cost
    Unique for a month
    rub / unique
    Maultalk.com
    12950
    58
    223.28
    Prowebber.ru
    1480
    87
    17.01
    Seonews.ru
    30000
    422
    71.09
    Talkwebber.ru
    1110
    61
    18,20
    Webtun.com
    2738
    46
    59.52
    Seopro.ru
    6000
    29th
    206.90
    Domenforum.net
    3700
    65
    56.92
    Webmasters.ru
    11100
    70
    158.57
    Webmasters.by
    7400
    36
    205.56
    Seobuilding.ru
    7000
    85
    82.35
    Total:
    83478
    959
    87.05


    At the same time, the conversion of transitions to results turned out to be quite high: 2994 transitions over the past month after the start of promotion gave 652 registrations. For us, this is a very important indicator, because we see the relevance and usefulness of our work. In fact, we take away part of the unloved by many webmasters, but the necessary work on monetization, allowing us to pay attention to the resource itself.

    ▌ Plans


    The current functionality is only the beginning on the path of turning Adverton into a money-making machine for everyone who launches it on their website. Now we are focusing on developing new analytics and testing opportunities for advertisements. In test mode, a targeting system has already been launched, which, based on the sources and characteristics of the audience, helps to choose the most suitable ad network.

    In other plans - the monetization of mobile traffic, which is still terra incognita for the Russian advertising market - our advertising networks are not able to monetize it effectively, which affects both those who generate traffic and users who have to deal with thoughtless and illiterate organized advertising .

    New announcements will follow shortly. Stay connected and don’t forget to test our capabilities: advertone.ru

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