PublisherSpot

Updated - 09/05/2008

Go to www.clicksor.com

Clicksor is a contextually-focused ad network based out of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is owned and operated by YesUp Ecommerce Solutions, Inc., which was founded in 1999 (incorporated in 2001) and is the parent company of many other internet ad companies including PayPopUp, InfinityAds, AsiaTraffic, and AdPreference.

The heart of YesUp’s network, Clicksor revolves mainly around contextual advertising, but also offers other mediums of advertising including graphical banners and pop-unders.

While Clicksor offers a wide spectrum of advertising formats such as banners, pop-unders, XML feeds, layer ads, and search boxes, their flagship product is their inline text links.

The text links are contextually driven and work similar to Kontera and IntelliTXT’s technology which automatically turns certain keywords into linkable ads. When these keywords are hovered over, a small ad appears which is then clickable.

Surprisingly however, Clicksor does not provide special XML tags which allows publishers to specify what content should be linked. This is an important and necessary feature that Clicksor needs to implement. Without being able to specify a portion of content, there are no limits to what will be linked. Titles and menu navigation are a couple examples of unwanted areas that may end up turning into ads. In fact, Clicksor’s inline text links may even appear over existing ads that contain text!

Another major caveat to Clicksor is that many publishers report extremely poor conversion rates, and thus revenue, due to their poor content-matching technology. This includes not just only their inline text links, but all of their ad creative including contextual and graphical banners as well.

Publishers can optionally add up to five keywords into their JavaScript code in order to establish better targeted ads, but this is only available for banners and text links. While this does provide a bit of better control, it is not proper contextual advertising. For example, a publisher with articles on many different subjects or topics would have to edit each page with specially modified JavaScript.

Compared to other content-matching networks such as Google’s AdSense, Clicksor has a lot of work to do in their ad-targeting department.

Another feature Clicksor offers is their Ad Marketplace. By referring advertisers with a special link, or whenever an advertiser clicks on the “Advertise here” text located at the bottom of text banners, publishers receive 85% of whatever advertiser spends on their site. This is approximately 15% more than the reported 70% payout that publishers receive from standards ads. With the Ad Marketplace, publishers can also set minimum bid prices via CPC, CPV, and CPM.

Larger publishers can take advantage of Clicksor’s Premium Site Partner feature. In order to be eligible, publishers must meet some fairly high requirements. For instance, at least one of the following traffic requirements must be met: Minimum 50,000 total impressions per day, CPC 150 clicks per day, CPM 10,000 impressions per day, or CPV 30,000 impressions per day.

Premium Site Partners receive additional features including being promoted to advertisers by Clicksor’s sales team, having the option of wire transfer available for payments over $2500, and access to the their ClicksorControl feature.

ClicksorControl allows publishers to set minimum prices for their ads. When Clicksor has ads matched to the site content that meet or exceed the desired price they will run them. When they can’t meet the desired rate, they will run defaults from other ad networks that publishers specify.

Signing up with Clicksor is fast and easy, and there are no W9 or W8BEN tax forms that need to be sent in. However, there are a number of prerequisites and guidelines that publishers must adhere to, including:

• Participating sites must have 5,000 page views per day.
• Must be 18+ or have signed permission from a guardian
• English-sites only
• 50% of site traffic must stem from the US, CA , or UK or will result in account suspension
• Participating Sites must not be a free hosting webpage or personal homepage.

Clicksor’s control panel is fairly plain and simple without a whole lot of options or features, but still offers all the basic essentials.

Stats are updated live, but are not audited until 24-72 hours later which is a fairly common practice for ad networks.

Publishers are allowed to display multiple ad formats on the same page, but only one of each format. For example, a page with a pop-under and banner is permitted, but not 2 pop-unders or two banners. In addition, banners must be displayed within the top 500 pixels.

Defaults are available, but only for pop-unders and graphical banners.

All ad formats are fully customizable, allowing publishers to modify colors and other options such as if links open in new windows or not. Publishers can also specify a pop-under’s time cap, which ranges anywhere from 6-minutes to 1-month.

The ad code is generated differently from the majority of ad networks in that publishers pre-select the type of ads they want to display, with Clicksor then creating all of the JavaScript at once, making one large chunk of code.

In addition to standard images, graphical banners may also contain Flash, and unfortunately publishers have no option to specify whether they wish to display Flash or not.

Clicksor claims to pay up to a 70% payout, but states that the “actual rates may vary depending on the Web site performance and market conditions.”

Payment is sent bi-weekly on a Net-15 payment cycle, and the minimum payment is set at $50. Publishers can be paid through Check, PayPal, or account credit; however account credit must be in the account for 7-days in order for the traffic to be fully audited.

Any publisher payment that is unclaimed 1 year after the issue date will not be compensated.

Clicksor offers a referral program which pays out 10% of whatever a referred publisher earns or whatever a referred advertiser spends, for up to one year.

The referral statistics and earnings are displayed separately from the standard ads, and the number of referred publishers and advertisers is displayed as well. Referral statistics can also be viewed by month, which allows publishers to keep an eye on how well their referrals are doing.

With e-mail, support tickets, live chat, and phone support available Mon-Fri from 9am-6pm, Clicksor offers a wide array of contact methods.

Their live chat is fast to respond, with a number of available support staff in different departments, and are generally quite helpful.

All publishers also receive their own account manager, however they only display their e-mail address and don’t offer a phone number or instant messenger to contact them by. This makes them rather pointless.

• While it varies on the type of site, Clicksor generally does allow ads to be displays on forums.
• Clicksor’s ads have been known to slow down the loading times of sites.

While Clicksor offers a number of different advertising formats, most publishers use them mainly for their inline text links. Unfortunately, they offer very poor content-matching, often resulting in very irrelevant ads. As a result, many publishers report extremely low conversion rates.

While Clicksor has great support and fast Net-15 payouts, their poor contextual matching and absence of content-specifying tags for their inline text links makes them a poor choice for an ad network when there are many better ones available.

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