Frequently Asked Questions from Adstrip managersTo read the FAQ for Viewers, please click here.To read the FAQ for Advertisers, please click here. Creating a Blogads account
Creating a Blogads account What is the minimum daily user number a blog should have before they can consider blogads? Blogs without a laser-sharp focus on one topic or community AND an audience of 1000 readers a day usually do not attract advertisers. But some blogs with a sharp focus AND an audience of thousands a day do NOT get advertisers. One test: have more than a handful of companies expressed an interest in advertising on your blog? Can I run Blogads and Google Adsense textads? No problem for us. Lots of bloggers use the two tactics to compliment each other. In its FAQ, Google bars "competing ads. This would include all content-targeted ads as well as text-based ads. Text-based ads, for this situation, can be loosely defined as ads that mimic AdWords ads or appear to be associated with AdWords ads on your site. We do allow affiliate or limited-text links." Setting up and customizing the adstrip I have lost my blogads welcome email. What is the javascript code I need to insert into my blog to run blogads? To find your blogads javascript code, log in to your blogads account at blogads.com. Click on Manage My Adstrips, then on the customize link in the row of your adstrip. You will see a navigation menu in the top right corner. Click on Boilerplate. The javascript code you need to paste into your site is at the bottom of the page. OK, I have pasted my javascript into my site and it is not working. Why? Sometimes it takes a few minutes before a new adstrip goes live. Wait for an hour and then refresh your blog page. If your adstrip is still not showing please drop us a note via http://www.blogads.com/contact I am using Typepad. How can I insert the Blogads code? Typepad customer support suggested the following: Use a TypeList to display the code, using a trick with the TypeLists feature. The instructions are available at: http://help.typepad.com/typelists/tips.html#additional_uses_for_link_typelists OK, I've got an adstrip. How am I going to get people to look at it, much less advertise in it? Prime the pump. Put up an ad for friends or products you admire. Give visitors a reason to pay attention. When do I appear on the Blogads order page? After your javascript has been running for two days and after you've exceeded 3000 page impressions in a week. As the number of bloggers in the network rises, we're working on ways to let advertisers drill down and focus on specific categories of blogs. How is pageviews measured? How often is it updated? The blogads server counts the pageviews by displaying a 1 pixel by 1 pixel invisible image on your blog, along with the javascripts. This may differ slightly from your own statistics, as spiders and search engine bots do not read javascripts. The number of pageviews is updated once a day. How can I make sure that my adstrip shows up on every page of my Blogger-hosted site? Insert the javascript unbracketed into the template. Take out all bracketed information that may get gerenated by Blogger as default around the code. How do I post ads on my own site without paying? When inputting your ad, use your adstrip's "offer code." Doing this bypasses Paypal and puts the ad directly into your queue of ad candidates. Can I use special characters, symbols in my “pitch”? Yes you can. In order to include characters such as &,@,® etc. please use the HTML code of the character. How can I change the pitch on the Blogads order page? Log in to your Blogads account, then click on the ˝Manage my adstrip˝ link on the left. At the end of your adstrip's row there is a customize link. Click on it. Now click on the ˝Pitch˝ link in the top right navigation bar. This will take you to the page where you can view and change your pitch. Don't forget to save your changes. How can I change my prices? Log in to your Blogads account, then click on the ˝Manage my adstrip˝ link on the left. At the end of your adstrip's row there is a customize link. Click on it. Now click on the ˝Boilerplate˝ link in the top right navigation bar. This will take you to the page where you can view and change your offer code. Don't forget to save your changes. How can I create a second adstrip, for example for premium orders or for another blog I run? Click on Manage My Adstrips in the nav bar. Below the table containing your current adstrip's name, click the link "Create new adstrip." Fill these out, using the same login info you normally use. A caveat: when it asks "Blog's name," be sure to give the new adstrip a different name from the current adstrips you have. If you have more than two adstrips posted in your blog's HTML, the quantity of adstrips should be noted in the description for each adstrip you provide for the Blogads order page; something like "the first of three adstrips" or "third of five adstrips" or "middle left of six adstrips" or "one of many." (From Blogads perspective, two or three adstrips per blog are the easiest to understand and sell.) Labels like "Premium" should be used sparingly, either denoting exclusivity and/or for adstrips priced at some multiple to the "standard" adstrip on the same blog. When viewing blogads on my site through Firefox, the adstrip occasionally displays improperly. The ad appears to be taking over the page. Is there anything that can be done about this? Mozilla/Netscape 7 and above has a bug that is related to javascript serving on pages with certain HTML. This problem is not specific to blogads: bugzilla.mozilla.org The problem occurs only once on a browser: if the user hits the back button or goes back to your page, everything will display as normal. Not all users are effected, but we have not been able to identify what exactly determines this. A blogads user suggested that by moving all .css style sheets into the Head part of the .html, the problem disappears. Another blogads user suggested that you insert the blogads javascript into your HTML the following way: <div class="side"> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="PUT_YOUR_BLOGADS_CSS_URL_HERE" /> <script language="javascript" src="PUT_YOUR_BLOGADS_JAVASCRIPT_URL_HERE"></script> <script language="javascript">var juryrig = 'hopethisfixesit';</script> </div> If you encounter this problem yourself on another blog, you should just set the style in your Firefox browser (view/style) to "no style". Accepting and running ads When I try to login I get the message ˝there is no adstrip˝. What gives? This suggests that you have entered your log in details incorrectly. Please try again. Note that both password and login are case sensitive. If it is still not working please write to us via http://www.blogads.com/contact I've received an e-mail that a new ad has been submitted into my blog. How do I review and approve it? Go to Blogads.com Log in with your e-mail address and password. Click on Manage my adstrips on the left. Click on the name of the adstrip in the middle of the page. You will see the new ad with its status marked as “on hold”. Change that to “any place” or any of the numbered positions. Save your changes towards the bottom of the page. The ad will appear in your adstrip, and on your blog, within a few minutes. What happens when I accept an ad and put it in the "anyplace" status? The ad will appear in a new position every 24 hours. We aim to increase the frequency of these random rotations, but have to find some spare minutes to write the code. How can friends post ads on my adstrip without paying for them? Have them use the same offer code. Don't worry, you still get to approve the ad. Where can I find my offer code and how can I change it? Log in to your Blogads account, then click on the ˝Manage my adstrip˝ link on the left. At the end of your adstrip's row there is a customize link. Click on it. Now click on the ˝Boilerplate˝ link in the top right navigation bar. This will take you to the page where you can view and change your offer code. Don't forget to save your changes. What happens if I don't like the way an advertiser has revised an ad that's already running? Write the advertiser and ask him to change the ad. If this doesn't work, we will manually revert the ad to its original state. In an emergency and you can't reach us, simply take the javascript out of your HTML until we've reverted the ad to its original form. Wouldn't it make sense for bloggers to approve all ad changes before they appear live? We're balancing a number of interests. First, we assume there's some level of trust established between the blogger and the advertiser. Second, a smart advertiser will want to experiment and update the ad a lot; complicating this process would be annoying to both parties. So this trust-but-verify scheme is the most efficient solution we've been able to cook up. If an advertiser does something that annoys you, "defer" his ad and drop him a line politely requesting a correction. I have recently upped my prices but see customers order ads at the old prices. How is this possible? We had included your blog in a proposal sent to an advertiser before you updated your prices. Proposals are valid for a month, and the proposal has just gotten approved. This explains why the old price is in the system. You can, of course, choose to accept or reject this ad. Traffic, payment and administration Site statistics show that I've got a lot more traffic than Blogads seems to register. What gives? There are a couple of possible explanations: 1. Blogads on every page. Make sure you have the blogads javascript on every page of your site. Archives, individual posts, pages with comments... everything. We can give you credit only for the pages that include the javascript code. 2. Spiders and robots. The blogads server counts the pageviews by displaying a 1 pixel by 1 pixel invisible image on your blog, along with the javascripts. This may differ slightly from your own statistics, as spiders and search engine bots do not read javascripts. This can account for a difference of roughly 10%. Also, note that the number of pageviews on blogads pages is updated once a day. 3. RSS. We also do not count traffic to your RSS feed, since feeds do not carry blogads. This can account for another 20% difference on some blogs. 4. Traffic measurement. If these reasons do not explain the difference, please install these two free statistics generators on your site for comparison: Sitemeter and Statcounter. They are simple to use and require little effort to install into your html code. Other statistics report generator programs may or may not identify the page views amongst the page hits accurately. This is caused by endless possibilities that the url's included in the page can have. For example, certain statistics generators may think that any hit for .php scripts counts as a page view, while some of the .php scripts serve images to be displayed on the page instead. Another option is to chec the pageviews based on the number of requests to a page logo (normally a .gif or image file related to the main heading of the blog site), as this is normally displayed on every page of the blog. This .gif image has a unique url. Take the www.blogads.com image url as a example: http://www.blogads.com/images/newlogo1.gif. You can check how many hits there are to this url every day and how it compares to the number of page views reported by blogads. 5. Still unsure? Contact us. If you have taken all of the above into consideration and still feel that there is a discrepancy, please send your raw access data logs to blog-tech@blogads.com and we will investigate. But please do this only once you have run through points 1-4. How do I set my Paypal address? Once you have logged in to your Blogads account click ˝My Account˝ on the left hand side. You will see the Paypal address field on this page. When do I get paid? To lessen the risk from chargebacks, we paypal within 15 days after end of month of purchase when your balance exceeds $75. We'll also sweep all accounts clean at year end. Make sure we've got your Paypal address in your "my account" page and we'll dose you out in our next bout of payouts. I seem to have Blogads that have run their course but are still in the "not paid yet" column. They also have no "Payment date." Why? We can only pay you for ads that have been paid for. While we require upfront payment from most advertisers, many agencies can only pay after they have been invoiced. For large orders of repeat customers we extend payment terms of 15 days from the date ads begin running. The silver lining in this delay is that there is no credit card fee for these payments, which are settled by check or wire transfer. I have passed the payout threshold of $75 and have inserted my paypal e-mail address, but still have not received money. Why? We can only pay you for ads that have been paid for. While we require upfront payment from most advertisers, many agencies can only pay after they have been invoiced. For large orders of repeat customers we extend payment terms of 15 days from the date ads begin running. The silver lining in this delay is that there is no credit card fee for these payments, which are settled by check or wire transfer. You can see the payment status of each of your ads on the Accounting screen within your blogads account, under "Payment date". Can you send me a check? The threshold for check payment is $750. If you'd rather wait until you have $750 in your account, please enter "PAY BY CHECK" in the Paypal email address field in the My Account area. I have recently revised my prices, and have just received an ad at the old price. Is there a delay before the new prices take effect? Your new prices take effect immediately. However, the ad you have just received was part of a proposal that we at blogads created for an advertiser before you revised your prices. Because larger advertisers as well as those working via agencies need some time to approve a proposal, prices in proposals are frozen for a month. It is of course your choice whether you reject this ad or accept it at the old price. What fees and charges are applicable to my Blogads account? Please click here, which will take you to the our Service Fees page applicable to bloggers joining the Blogads network. The charges applicable to your account may differ from these and are available via the footer of your adstrip admin pages once you have logged into your blogads account. Why do the payout percentages recorded in the accounting archive vary slightly from ad to ad? Different payment channels have different fees. There's no fee when we get paid directly, as happens 1 in 5 times (or so). Paypal's fee varies a little depending on transaction size. Worldpay charges another set of fees on another sliding scale. And Amex charges something else. So basically, there's an infinite variation in these fees. How can I change my login e-mail address? Only we can change it for you. Drop us a note via http://www.blogads.com/contact and include your new email address as well as your password. Please note that the new e-mail address must be one that is not used for any other account and has never been used on the blogads system before. Does Blogads send any tax documents? We have been told by the IRS that advertising sales are a kind of service that does not require the preparation of 1099s or any kind of tax reporting from us to the IRS. Consequently, we send them - or you - no information. You can, however, put together the information you need for your taxes based on the Accounting page within blogads. You will find the link to this page towards the bottom of the Manage My Adstrips page, underneath the list of adstrips. Mininetwork How can I join a Mininetwork? Assuming you are a blogad seller, membership in Mininetworks is at the sole discretion of the mininetwork administator, the blogger who manages the network. The administrator sets terms for participation. This may include linking to the network page, ad positions, including a mininetwork logo. Only bloggers who are linked to the network should show up on the network page. Can I create a Mininetwork of my own? Write ad-niche@blogads.comand explain why you'd like to create a mininetwork. We prefer to deal with long-time bloggers, people who are focused in a particular niche, people who have a track record of supporting Blogads. |
To read the FAQ for Viewers, please click here.
To read the FAQ for Advertisers, please click here.
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