Anyone using iSocket.com for direct ad sales?

[CTXMedia]

I set-up a Goggle's DfP Small Business account some time ago so I could directly sell ad space for all of my sites. Unfortunately it doesn't offer any sales facility, so you have to do all the selling yourself at your own site and manually take orders/payments and create the campaigns and manage creative.

That's great if you've got people who can do this for you and a merchant account to take credit card orders, but I don't really want to have to do this - I want a service that would do the selling of my ad space for me; run on semi-auto-pilot (I still want to approve creative).

So I've had a look around and two services in particular have been talked about a lot: buysellads.com and isocket.com (thanks for the tip Peter )

From the looks of it iSocket.com would be best suited for my sites so I wondered if anyone else has any experience working with them?

• Did your ad revenue increased as a result of using the service?
• Can you use Adsense for unsold inventory?
• Do your advertisers find it easy to book campaigns?
• What does a custom ad sales page look like (to a potential advertiser)?
• What is the payment schedule like?
• Does each site you want to list have to have a minimum 100,000 unique visitors per month?

I'm assuming that the full-blown DfP (not Small Business) offers a similar service but I get the idea from their site that you need to be a very bigpublisher in the order of tens of millions of impressions per month?

Any advice appreciated from anyone who's managed to put their own ad sales on auto-pilot.

Cheers,
Shaun

 

[John Ramey]

Hi Shaun, Founder/CEO of isocket here. Wanted to answer some of your questions, assuming it's not rude of me to do so (not trying to hijack or sell.)

You're absolutely right about DFP. It's a good ad server, but it's the "back office" software and doesn't do any of the customer facing "front of the store" stuff. That's why Google partnered with isocket - we were the first to do this type of integration. Google did a case study here. It's since been copied by some of our competitors, but I won't comment on how it works for them.

1) Ad revenue increase?
This totally varies by publisher. Some do, some don't see a difference. While there are "lift" benefits from being in our marketplace, because isocket's not an ad network or rep firm we don't go out and do your sales for you. But by making it easier for advertisers to find you and do business with you, in combination with your own sales efforts, you will do more business.

2) AdSense for remnant?
Yep. The guy who created AdSense at Google is on our Board! (He's now head of advertising products at Facebook.) P.S. you can do all sorts of stuff with your remnant, not just AdSense.

3) Advertisers find it easy?
I hope so, but always looking for ways to improve. We've got a couple thousands happy advertisers so far, including Google, Salesforce, etc!

4) What does a custom ad sales page look like?
Check out TechCrunch's: www.buyads.com/website/techcrunch

5) Payment schedule?
Very fast. As soon as the money for a campaign is received by us and the campaign has started, we credit it to your account. Average wait time from money received for campaign to in your bank is about 15 days.

6) 100,000 visitor minimum for each property?
Yes, with exceptions. And in fact our minimums recently went up. It's more art than science and we review each site individually, but without a history of direct ad sales we prefer sites with >1M page views per month.

7) DFP Premium vs SB
Nope, DFP Premium doesn't do direct sales either, and isocket integrates with that too. Many of our name brand Top 1,000 publishers use isocket + DFP Premium together.

Cheers!

 

[CTXMedia]

Thanks John - much appreciated.

I'll get in touch by email and chat to your team about my main site and whether you feel it would be a reasonable "fit" for your service.

Cheers,
Shaun

 

[Jeff Fuqua]

As an option, I use Digital Point Advertising for this.

http://advertising.digitalpoint.com/advertiser.php