Today I´ll speak about 2 online services that enable you to manage your different ad networks on your site or blog. Both services are free and will help you to maximize your ad revenues.

If you want to make money from your blog, it would be a good idea to place some advertisements on it. If one of your readers clicks on one of those ads, you´ll get revenues from some cents to even some dollars if you show profitable keywords. Besides Goolge Adsense, there are many different networks you can use to monetize your blog, be it Adbrite, AuctionAds, Yahoo Advertising etc…

You could place a whole bunch of different ads on your blog to make some money from it. But the time will come where you´ll get into trouble managing all those networks. You´ll also want to know what performs best on your site or blog and brings you the highest earnings. So here come 2 nice and free services that´ll do most of the (maybe) hard work involved with it.

1. ClickAider

Although ClickAider is still in its beta phase, it seems like a really good service to manage your ads. This service will track your visitors behavior while clicking different ads on your page. All you have to do to get started is creating a free acount and placing some lines of Javascript in your site/blog template, which is easy (even for for non-coders). From now on, their servers create statistics about the click behavior on your site, including informations from where the user who clicked came from or what the actual link/keyword was.

By far the best feature is that you can track more than just a single advertisement network at the same time. With help of the usage statistics you can really optimize your different ads. For example if you see that a particular ad block doesn´t work because it only generates some clicks per month, you could drop that block or exchange it with another block from a different ad networks that performs better, you´ll find all the information for the best performing ads in the statistics provided by ClickAider. You can also use those statistics in the case of a ban because of a supposed click fraud, you can see who actually clicked on your ads to make prove that it wasn´t your fault.

ClickAider is still in a beta phase, therefore it is also free for the moment. If they come out of the test phase, they may want you to pay for some of their services (although they promise to still offer some free services furthermore) , so join know as long as you can use the program for free. You can even have a look at a demo account they provide you to test all the features.

2. PubMatic

PubMatic is like ClickAider, but it goes a step further. Besides providing statistics on your ad clicks, the system also manages your ad layouts like color combinations or banner sizes. You have to place special ad tags in your site or blog that enables this service to track your ads. After placing these tags, the system begins to automatically optimize your advertisements (size, color…). They also offer you a single management interface to keep track on all your different networks like Google Adsense, ValueClick or Komli, you can also use a widget to show your statistics.

But it also has some drawbacks. The first thing is the amount of ad networks you can choose from, they offer much less networks than ClickAider for example and most of these networks are for websites or blogs that meet high quality guidlines (I won´t say we all have ugly and boring blogs, but most of us are far from the “perfect” page). The second thing is the ad layout management, so far a nice feature because the system “learns” what ad layout performs best on your site, but it´s more the time actually involved in this “learning” phase. For a well known blog with huge daily traffic it won´t be a problem, but as a “normal” blogger you would have to wait a long time, because the system needs some thousand pageviews to generate (or guess) the best ad layout.

PubMatic is in beta testing too, so they are free for the moment and may want you to pay for their service when they go live. If you want more information, have a look at this video, that shows you how PubMatic works.

In my opinion ClickAider would be the better choice from these two programs. It offers more ad networks (and especially those mainly used on blogs) and they also promise to keep some free services after coming out of their beta testing phase. Because I´m currently searching for nice ad networks to include in my blog, I´ll test out those programs more deeper soon. I´ll keep you informed!

So long!
Querblogger