Another story about starting a startup

The golden rule for developing successful projects is to do what you yourself would use. Like many projects, Adverton grew out of the fact that once the needs of the creators of the project did not coincide with the opportunities offered by the market. Today we will talk about the development and promotion of our startup, as well as some useful figures from our experience.

▌ Development

We started off as webmasters. At some point, our business grew to 318 sites, for which we were responsible for monetization. Alternately testing various ad networks, for 9 months we have managed to increase the total revenue from them by 2.7 times.

At the same time, we understood that the process of advertising management lacks automation. Website owners want to earn money on them, but not everyone is willing to spend too much time understanding the intricacies of various advertising systems and choosing which of them will bring greater earnings. If only there was a tool that allowed the webmaster to find new ad networks, register, configure, insert ad codes and compare the results in one window ...
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So we came up with Adverton .

The idea to aggregate all possible networks in one place came to us in the spring of 2012, and closer to its end we already started to implement it directly.

First pancake

Getting to know the topic as developers has already cooled our enthusiasm a little. Most ad networks do not offer any API and have no plans for its development. The only network offering API — and that truncated — is the Adlab “Medianet”.

Therefore, we have started developing bots (connectors) for users who would register for them and work on advertising network sites. We planned to earn money through referral programs of advertising networks that would deduct us a percentage for users registered through us. For the users themselves, our functionality would be free at the same time.

However, this solution was not optimal for a small startup: the interfaces of dozens of ad networks are significantly different from each other, and setting up connectors for each and then constantly repairing them, responding to bugs and changes to them, required inadequate resources. As a result, planning to launch with 15 networks, we approached the opening in November 2013 with only five.

Another option for the development of this idea was the creation of a mega-connector, i.e. one superuser in each advertising network through which our users' accounts would be managed. This would simplify the logging process, but at the same time all the difficulties of managing user accounts remained, and responsibility for financial settlements with users was added, including all the risks - whether the advertising network delays the payment to the webmaster or blocks his account - we turn out to be extreme.

Realizing that we could not build a properly working service in this way, we refused to use connectors. Perhaps we will return to this idea in the future, but by revising the approach:

• First, on the basis of statistics, we will determine which networks are most in demand by our users and offer them to manage their accounts through AdvertOne with their login and password.
• secondly, we hope that market requirements will lead ad networks to the decision to develop their API.

In the meantime, we focused on the functionality for placing advertisements of different networks in one container.

Launch

By February 2014, the number of ad networks supported by Adverton has grown to 26, including not only teaser networks, but also Google Adsence and Yandex.Direct.

Along the way, we solved a number of technical issues related to the need to make the codes of different systems work correctly in one advertising container.

For example, the scripts of many ad networks still use synchronous code. The glitch of one of them could cause the entire page to hang. We have found a solution for asynchronous loading of the code of an advertising container containing JS scripts, which can be either asynchronous or synchronous. If interested, we will write more about this in the following posts.

Now we offer our users to register in them and generate the code of advertisements on their own, and then post it via Adverton on their website. The main advantage of using our system is the possibility of correct A / B testing of the effectiveness of various advertising networks. The problem of choosing the most profitable network is that it is difficult to achieve ideal comparison conditions, because the time of display, location and quantity also affect the results of advertising spin.

Placing advertisements of different networks in one ad container via AdvertOne is now the easiest and most accurate way to analyze. The number of ad impressions in an equal share is distributed among all connected networks in one ad unit, which allows identifying the leader in profitability for a particular resource by the amount of money earned.

▌ Promotion

Having started, we faced the most important task of all startups - to tell about the target audience. We didn’t come to Habr right away :-), but started with the fact that we began to search for our users among the audience about SEO and monetization blogs. We have a list of publications on the “ About the Project ” page.

We are ready to share some results, because we think that our experience in this case will be useful for other projects working in the field of Internet advertising.

Blog	Unik for the month
maulnet.ru	218
kurilo.pro	114
asbseo.ru	55
designfire.ru	four
wildo.ru	169
wpnew.ru	23
vovka.su	24
delexp.net	67
sidash.ru	eight
cyber-promo.ru	12
billznaet.ru	54
altblog.ru	21
bormaley.com	12
blog.dimok.ru	nineteen
www.seofive.ru	five
vk.com/typ_web	28
vk.com/web_faq	7
www.seonews.ru	133
habrahabr.ru	1046
Total:	2019

Although the data on most of the blogs were collected in a month, the main traffic from them went on the day of publication and the next 2-3 days, then dropping to insignificant values. Predictably, the most powerful source of traffic turned out to be Habr. "Tail" from the publication on Habré is also longer - transitions from it went a week after our first post .

In parallel, we launched banner ads on a number of thematic sites and forums:

Banner advertising
Site	Cost of accommodation	Unik for the month	rubles / unic
Maultalk.com	12950	58	223.28
Prowebber.ru	1480	87	17.01
Seonews.ru	30,000	422	71.09
Talkwebber.ru	1110	61	18.20
Webtun.com	2738	46	59,52
Seopro.ru	6000	29	206.90
Domenforum.net	3700	65	56.92
Webmasters.ru	11,100	70	158.57
Webmasters.by	7400	36	205.56
Seobuilding.ru	7,000	85	82.35
Total:	83478	959	87.05

At the same time, conversion of transitions into results turned out to be quite high: 2994 transitions over the past month after the start of the promotion gave 652 registrations. For us, this is a very important indicator, because we see the relevance and usefulness of our work. In fact, we take on the part of the unloved by many webmasters, but the necessary work on monetization, allowing us to pay attention to the resource itself.

▌ Plans

The current functionality is just the beginning on the way to turning “Adverton” into a money making machine for everyone who launches it on their website. Now we are focused on the development of new analytics and testing of advertisements. In the test mode, a targeting system has already been launched, which, based on the sources and characteristics of the audience, helps to choose the most appropriate advertising network.

In other plans, the monetization of mobile traffic, which is still terra incognita for the Russian advertising market, cannot be effectively monetized by our advertising networks, from which both traffic generators and users who have to deal with thoughtless and illiterately organized advertising suffer .

New announcements will follow shortly. Stay in touch, and do not forget to test our capabilities: advertone.ru