Infolinks -Linking Text to Revenue – Review

Infolinks -Linking Text to Revenue – Review
Even 3 weeks back “Infolinks” was an alien term for me but all changed when I received an email about advertisements from one of the infolinks managers – Sarah. First I completely ignored her email and thought that one to be one of the multiple emails that manages to pass through the gmail spam filter. However, after few days she emailed me again. This time I decided to read the email and found out it was about text link advertising. They also mentioned that they offer industry’s highest pay rate. I was not very happy with the other content link advertisements that  I have been using – Kontera and Adbrite, so i thought why not give it a try? That’s how my journey started with “Infolinks - Linking Text to Revenue”. I joined them on March 27th, 2009. Today I am going to tell you about my experience spanning about 2 weeks with Infolinks.

Joining Infolinks:
The application process was simple and approval was quick. It took them only 3 days to check and verify my website – www.calcuttatube.com. I always like advertising networks who actually check the website before approving their ads.
You can join infolinks here: http://infolinks.com/signup.html

Integrating Infolinks code in your website:
Integrating infolinks is not difficult at all and very similar to any other text-link ads. You get your infolinks code that you implement within the body part of your webpage. From your admin panel, you can also choose  the number of infolinks ads to be shown in your web pages (you can select up to 12). You do not have to change any part of your website at all. If you have too many images and little content, you should try to add more contents as all text-link ads show up for the “content” only. I have 100′s of pages of good content so, that was not a problem.

Tracking Infolinks Revenue for multiple websites
Tracking the infolinks performance is a problem if you have multiple websites as I do. You can not track multiple websites using one account at this point. If you have to track revenue for different webpages, you must sign up for multiple accounts. Which makes no sense and I hope they improve the tracking in near future.

CTR and eCPM
The Click Through Rate (CTR) with infolinks is pretty good. I am getting about 1.5% CTR over last 2 weeks. The eCPM (Effective Cost Per Thousand Impression)  is little lower than I expected. I am not going to reveal the eCPM as it may be against the policy of infolinks. You can try infolinks for a week or so and find out about it. It is still better than many other in-text advertisers.

Infolinks Vs other in-text advertisers (ex: Kontera/Adbrite)
I have never had great success from any in-line advertising so far. I have used the major ones including Adbrite, Kontera and few more. The revenue from Infolinks is much better compared to other in text advertisements but there are ways to improve the infolinks payment structure.

Support
Support is very important. Some of the advertisers are too big to provide good support. For example, even google adsense support is only via user forum. You can easily find thousands of customers not very satisfied with google support. Sometimes, they would answer your question on the support forum, but not always. So far, the support for infolinks is great. Whenever I had questions, I simply emailed them with inquiries and they replied quickly. The good customer support is another reason that I am staying with them.

Payments from Infolinks
With infolinks you can accept payments easily using Paypal or via wire transfer to your bank account. I have not yet reached my minimum payment amount set to be 100 USD yet. I hope that they make timely payments.