Affmeter is an essential part of any affiliate’s setup so I was rather saddened to learn that it is no longer going to be available for free.
I discovered Affmeter shortly after becoming an affiliate last year. It’s a really handy bit of software that logs in to all the affiliate networks you are signed up with and amalgamates all your earnings into one report. Every half hour it pops up a message on the screen telling you how well (or in my case usually, how poorly) your earnings are progressing. Best of all it’s been available for free.
So it was somewhat disappointing to be greeted with a message today informing me that the free version is being discontinued. It looks like the announcement was made last week but the news has only just caught up with me. It’s a shame but I quite understand their reasons. I’d often wondered how much money they made off their Pro version when the free version did 99% of what most affiliates want. Obviously not enough to keep the wolves from the door.
As someone who develops software for a living, I know how much time and effort it takes to produce a quality product like Affmeter. There’s nothing similar on the market that I’m aware of and the people behind it are very responsive to affiliates’ needs. It’s a well-respected product but you can only get so far on the respect and good wishes of your users. Bills need paying. Stomachs need filling.
So it’s a shame that a good thing has come to an end but I’ll be paying the very reasonable upgrade fee (less than £20 at current exchange rates). Affmeter Free is dead, long live Affmeter Pro.
I’ve been playing around with openads. It’s an incredibly powerful ad delivery platform which is open source and available for the princely sum of zero. The best feature for me though is the ability to target your ads depending on the geographic location of your site’s visitors.
Like most UK affiliates I’m primarily promoting UK merchants to UK customers. With PPC it’s easy to make sure that you’re only bringing in UK visitors but if your SEO is good enough or your content compelling enough you’ll soon have visitors from all over the world. These international visitors will most probably not be able to take advantage of the offers you’re promoting so you won’t be making any money from them.
I recently discovered that a long neglected site of mine was still getting a fair bit of traffic from organic search and that the majority of the visitors were US-based. I do use Adsense on the site which automatically handles showing the right ads to the right international visitors but I also have some image banner space and I wanted to target appropriate ads to those US visitors - they tend not to have much need for Sky TV in the States.
Openads is a PHP/MySQL solution. Installation is relatively straightforward with a wizard which steps you through setting up the database. If you’ve done a Wordpress installation you should probably be OK.
Once you’re logged in things can look a bit daunting. Openads is able to handle the ads for very large networks of sites and so there’s more features there than you need. Openads refers to each site as a publisher and each banner space within that site as a zone. I just set up one site and one zone within it to start with. You tell openads the size of each zone eg 468×60 so it knows which ads can fit in which space. You get a choice of “invocation codes” to paste into the appropriate place on your site as you would for Adsense or any other banner. The choice of code types is a bit confusing but I found IFRAME worked best on my sites.
On the other side of the equation you set up advertisers and the campaigns for each advertiser. I set up Amazon US as an advertiser and just created a default campaign. Then you add one or more banners within the campaign. Banners can be images, text or HTML. I pasted in the HTML that Amazon gave me.
You then assign banners to zones. As I only had one banner and one zone it was a simple case of linking the two together. If you’ve got multiple sites though there are loads of options and permutations for deciding which ads go on which sites.
After setting up a second advertiser of Amazon UK with a UK centric banner it was time do the geotargetting magic. This bit’s not very well documented. You need to download the free GeoLite Country database from Maxmind (get the binary format) and copy it into a directory on your website. Then in the openads geotargetting settings page enter the location of the data file in the ‘MaxMind GeoIP Country Database Location’ box. This should be the filesystem path eg /var/www/html/GeoIP.dat not a web address.
Finally I went back to my Amazon US banner and set a Delivery restriction by selecting ‘Geo - Country’ and picking the USA. Now my site is displaying an Amazon US banner to US visitors and an Amazon UK one to everyone else.
Now this may seem like a lot of work to achieve something relatively minor and you may wonder if its worth bothering given the appallingly low banner clickthrough rates. But openads is much more powerful than just a banner server. The ability to use HTML banners means you can effectively target any kind of content to visitors based on a number of criteria. For example, if you are building a postal mailing list you may wish only to show the sign up form to UK visitors. Or you might want to show adult offers late at night and family friendly ones during the day.
I’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible with openads. I’m sure I’ll find many more features as I play around with it some more. I also haven’t tried integrating it with this blog but I’ll have a go real soon now.