I’m working on a events listing service, based on a PPC model for featured listings. Wondering if anyone knew of software that could handle the bidding/tracking? It doesn’t seem to be a particularly popular option, and after a couple of hours of Googling for white-label PPC etc, I’ve come up with nothing!
Options I’ve considered so far:
Affiliate software - seems like it’d be a huge headache to manhandle software designed to track incoming traffic from other peoples’ sites, to track clicks on my site
Google Analytics/other analytics - track clicks using GA, and then write the backend to do bidding etc?
Ideally it’d be Google Adsense but running only to ‘feature’ listings that have enough budget left to cover the bid, with as much tracking etc as possible.
Thanks Ted, looks like good advice. I had a look for Rails scripts and came across this elsewhere: http://github.com/coolblade/rails-ad-server. Doesn’t really fit our needs, perhaps it will be useful for others.
Quite a lot of the scripts do some of what we want but we’d need quite a lot of integration… Feels like some wheel reinvention may be in order.
This is a great question. I suspect you’ll find some ad platforms on Hot Scripts that will work for setting up campaigns and tracking, some will even have client interfaces for reporting, but I haven’t seen much out there in the way of full bidding tools which means either creating or modifying.
Of course there are advantages to your own system, mainly integration to your site (you don’t just want the track clicks, you want to understand how the user got to the click, how changes influence results, roi, etc) and fraud (using a canned system means people can find out how your fraud tracking works which is bad).
Have you found a few ad scripts worth modifying or would you like suggestions for those?