CJ.com and other CPA advertisers

[compuken]

So far my arcade site with little traffic has brought in NO revenue from CJ.com, I remember a few years back when I paid for google adwords to advertise a few companys on CJ.com, I remember getting a few hundred clicks a day for some companies and just a dozen or so for others. The funny thing was the hundred click clients gave me very few sales and I lost money with them, the dozen clicks with the other companies made me a bit of money (around a hundred a week). With my arcade site I have now around 200 clicks total and have yet to make any revenue from them. Has anyone had any luck with the CPA advertisers with over 300 clicks a day from your game players?

I am still debating what to put into my 3 ad spots for my game, either it will be google, adbrite, cj.com or "advertise here" - selling my own adspace. What has worked best for everyone? I plan to follow kings of chaos advertising plan - 3 ad spots for every page and have 7 of the non-popup CPM advertisers rotating, does this sound like a good idea?

[Zeggy]

I don't think google or adbrite will work very well since they are CPC based. CPM based is better for browser games because there aren't many CPC ads for browser games. If you put up CPM ads you would probably make much more since browser games require a lot of refreshing and tend to have really high pageview counts. Visitors also stay at your website longer, and there are more return visitors.
If your game is really popular, you might want to opt for organising your own ads, then you can negotiate the price of an ad.
I don't know about cj.com because I haven't used it before, but if CJ allows incentivized offers, and supports automatic notification of sub-IDs, or at least saves sub-IDs, you could set up a system in your game where your players can complete offers to get extra gold or whatever you want.
Players would complete offers for you, and both of you would get something in return. I think this would earn a webmaster the most money, but I don't know many affiliate programs that automate sub-ID tracking and notification.
I recently joined MaxBounty.com, and they track sub-IDs, but I need to log in, download the list of Sub-IDs and apply the rewards myself.

btw, what I mean with sub-IDs is to track the offers that a user completes. Some affiliate programs alow you to add an extra variable in the offer URLs where you can use that extra variable to track different things to optimize where to place your offers or to track who completes your offers, like this:
http://www.affiliate-program-url-here.com/offer?id=[OFFER_ID]&subid=[SUBID]

You could add the ID of the player's account to the end of the offer link so you can know if they completed an offer or not.

[compuken]

I think most of the companies say that they don't want their ad clicked upon for rewards of anytime, or I may have read that in the CJ terms.

Do you know of more CPM based programs that will take in sites that are new or with low traffic?

[Zeggy]

Hmm, I don't know many CPM programs for new sites.
You could try applying to ValueClick Media when your site starts going a bit. It's what I use on some pages
You can't put their ads on forums though.

You may want to keep re-applying every so often when you are turned down. I had to re-apply many times to get an account

On MaxBounty.com there are some offers that allow incentives, but most are for US based traffic only.

[toto]

I use ValueClick Media, but they hardly pay anything (less than 0.2 CPM) on gaming sites.
I would definitely move to adBrite or a similar program.

[Zeggy]

Well, you could try using interstitials. They pay a lot and only appear once in a while (you can set the time intervals). And they don't take up any extra space on your pages, just a small javascript code.

[toto]

I used interstitials for some time, but I was under the impression that I got less return visitors. I removed them because of that.
However, you're right, they only appear every once in a while.

[overklokan]

and that is EXACTLY why i hate them the most ... one other option is clicksor.com

i dropped CJ program yesterday ... after little thinking (and seeing how little clicks
on text links i had, even for ones like "Unlimited game downloads") i figured out my
site is NOT about download games so why offer them? also, i guess most of visitors
expect FREE stuff when searching for browser games ... conclusion is that all CJ
ads where UNRELATED to content on my site so it's not surprise at all i got 0 money
in 2 weeks!

also, with CJ even text links require some 1x1 image download ... i had like 15 CJ
text links and with all those images total page download time was around 10 seconds!
after removing them time needed for page download dropped to around 4 seconds ...

[ZadoAsh]

I use CJ.com on my game (familiesofnewyork.com)

Currently I haven't been able to program in their API's so I currently credit them manually

 I use them for what I call 'Credit Offers'

They sign up to a survey or something similar that's free, CJ then reward me for the lead (if successful) I also add a Sub-ID so I can reward the user who signed up to it with 'Credits'


It's pretty simple and from time to time it works... My game will maybe make ?10 on a good month (From CJ, I know it sucks... but the game is small still) and I'll get around that maybe more from Paypal(?10) and SMS(?10) donations

On a monthly basis so, it does work... as long as you manage to check it everyday or every couple of hours to credit users as quickly as possible... or spend most your time trying to make their API's work.

I do hope this helps someone =D it's worth a try at least =]