My AuctionAds gripe

March 29, 2007

I wrote a couple of weeks back that I was going to give Jeremy Schoemaker’s AuctionAds a spin, it certainly looked promising. Now admittedly I haven’t rolled it out beyond one small site because of this:

auctionads

The thing is, because AuctionAds isn’t contextual it’s near on hopeless unless you’ve got a very, very targeted niche site, and the we’re not contextual so you can run it along side of Adsense units is incorrect: Google now allows contextual ads units from other providers as long as those ads don’t look the same as the Google Adsense units on site, which AuctionAds don’t. I tried the ol’ Chitika WordPress hack: inserting the post title php code into the keyword field within the AuctionAd’s script to get contextual ads: unlike Chitika it doesn’t work with AuctionAds. Now if I was running static websites that weren’t template based I could place AuctionAds on a per page basis tuned to the product, but I run WP dynamic sites where I don’t code the ad on a per page basis, but site wide. Hopefully, hopefully some one from AuctionAds reads this post and looks into contextual ad units, this is a company I’d really like to get behind and use, but the product is losing me money at the moment and as such I’m not about to expand my use.

Postscript: check this site out: ps3-blog.info, not my site but up for sale as a “AuctionADs Automated Blog” in this thread at DigitalPoint. Instead of PS3 ads, I’m seeing ads for “Authentic Coach Signature Small Soft Duffle Black”, completely useless. AuctionAds served contextually would be a kickass product.

2 responses to My AuctionAds gripe

  1. You can make ‘AuctionAds’ contextual. I have blogged about how I managed to get it work:

    http://www.mmisoftware.co.uk/weblog/?p=243

    Basically, if you have tags/keywords associated with a blog you pull them from the database for a given blog entry and then ‘stuff’ them in to the ‘AuctionAd’ code (fairly easy to do if you know some php and MySQL).

  2. I have been working on a system to allow auctionads to give dynamic results, using PHP ive got a system where the system adapts what is shown based upon if users click on particular types of adverts, have a read – http://blog.assembleron.com/2007/05/04/how-to-make-auctionad-dynamic-with-php/