LA Team created this for our board meeting yesterday.
Ad networks make our sites look low rent and the ads themselves are usually ugly.
But it made us money, hundreds of thousands of dollars each quarter.
After ending our ad sales relationship with NBC in 2008, we brought it all in house: ad sales, account management, creative services, and ad operations. Ad ops got good at optimizing our remnant inventory. To avoid competition, as our sales team grew, we added more and more brands to the ad network blacklist.
So we started ramping up house ads. We had a lot to promote: PopSugar TV, OnSugar, CelebStyle, PopSugar Mobile, ShopStyle, ShopStyle Mobile, and etc. So that kinda worked. The ads looked much prettier. But they made no money and drove more house ad impressions.
"We can rebuild them. We have the technology. We have the capability to build it. We can make them better than they were before. Better, stronger, faster.*"
The technology we have is ShopStyle, the best search engine for the best fashion brands. What if we use ShopStyle products to create beautiful shopping ads? We already have strong business relationships with all the top retailers and ShopStyle gets paid for driving them traffic. Why not distribute ShopStyle around our sites?
Ad Networks vs. ShopStyle Shopping Ads
Could we create an ad that drove equal dollars and looked prettier?
For the months of December & January we ran tests of millions of impressions to compare our fully optimizied ad networks versus our ShopStyle ads. To make the ads more relevent to our readers, the ads are contextual, so if J.Crew appears on the page, J.Crew products appear in the ad.
Results
Ad Networks: $.51 CPM
ShopStyle Ads: $2.79 CPM
We are very pleased with the results and are now ramping down the ad networks and replacing them with our ShopStyle ads for a much wider scale test.
We are also adding these ads to our ShopSense service so anyone can use them and make money! Check out ShopSense now for your site.
*Quote adapted from The Six Million Dollar Man
