theConnect.io Pre-launch

Hi,

As a few of you might know, we have been working on our advertising platform for quite a while now - and yes, it took longer than expected.

One of the reasons for the delay is that we kept adding new features and our other business (ad trading desk) took a massive jump up. We recently got 75,000 QPS (Queries Per Second) added to our stack, so we had to make new RTB connections in order to meet some of that supply.

To make a long story short... 4-5 months ago we made the decision to jump into the crypto ad space, but as our trading desk is not designed for "Self-serve" advertisers or publishers, we had to develop a simple, yet powerful UI.

The UI will never be 100% completed as we keep developing new features and ad formats, various types of video ads, etc...

What we have now is traditional banner ads (no text ads) and within 1-2 weeks we will implement our Interstitial ads.

PUBLISHERS;

We believe that we have created several unique features, such as "Placement Capping", "Advanced Analytics", etc...

Let me try to explain how it works;

Add your site(s) and wait for approval. Once approved you can create placements (where the banner will be placed)

Add site 1: https://i.imgur.com/O4E7ueR.png
Add site 2: https://i.imgur.com/FMJOcof.png

Once a site is approved, you can now create a placement...

Create placement 1: https://i.imgur.com/NTCSMd3.png in this case I have created a 728x90, which will be placed above the claim button on my faucet. What I also have done is that I have limited the amount of impressions that I will send to the network - in this case 1 impression (per unique user) per 15 minutes. The "Pass Back feature is, where you can set the banner code from the network you want to show, when ours is not showing. You can set the "Placement Capping" however you like.

We know that some of the other networks don't pay you for all impressions, so setting a cap and a pass back is a good way to earn additional revenue for your traffic.

Once you have created a placement, simply go to "Generate Ad Code" and choose the site: https://i.imgur.com/EHUA9lW.png

You will then see: https://i.imgur.com/s2jRuB1.png click Generate Code for a placement and paste it on your site. I this case I created 2 placements and mistakenly called them by the same name :/ You can call them whatever you like though.

You can generate 2 different kinds of code, we recommend AJAX as it loads extremely fast and is async.

Finally you can check stats based on various criteria: https://i.imgur.com/8IIJ2qc.png Stats update every 1-2 minutes.

And that's it

ADVERTISERS;

This is a little more complex, so prepare for a long read Grin

First step is to fund your account, currently we accept BTC but will soon implement other currencies - suggestions are welcome!
If you want to run a campaign ASAP, contact us and let us know in which currency you wish to pay. After confirmation, we will manually credit your account with the agreed funds.

Create a campaign: Go to "My Campaigns" page and click "Add New Campaign" That will take you here: https://i.imgur.com/Am9SkMX.png

In this example https://i.imgur.com/xSOD1LC.png I have created a CPM campaign at $0.25 CPM, each unique user will only see my ad once per 5 minutes and I have enabled "ROI Tracking" with a value of $0.05 per click.

ROI tracking is an INTERNAL tool and will NOT have any effect on either performance or cost. Later I will show you how it is used, or at least the idea behind it

Step 2: https://i.imgur.com/naY1ban.png this is where you set the targeting for your campaign. You can leave them all as set by default, except "Traffic Source" https://i.imgur.com/1ZhFBoW.png You have to choose a source in order to create the campaign.

Premium is meant to be blogs, news, etc... And Non-premium is for faucets and faucet games type of sites.

Next step is to add banners to the campaign: https://i.imgur.com/9nOpAEd.png You can add as many as you like, we recommend at least 2 banners in each size - Don't forget to give them different names so you can see how each performs. (I will show you later)

Here are some of the test campaigns we have done: https://i.imgur.com/gRJ909T.png
Let's use the Freebitco.in campaign as an example, as you can see we set a CPM of $0.10 and we track ROI by clicks, which is valued at $0.05 per click.
https://i.imgur.com/iqJPipN.png

Here are the banners we used for the campaign: https://i.imgur.com/MBnIKa8.png

Reports, on this page you can track the performance for each campaign, for each GEO and on each placement. There are various ways you can filter the reports, let's have a look at the freebitco.in campaign...

https://i.imgur.com/6Rh4q2B.png Here I have filtered to only show stats for that campaign for current month. Look at "ROI", it shows (based on what I valued a click at) as being profitable by 15.69%

Let's dig further into the stats, for example by country: https://i.imgur.com/YgPJdgP.png then we see this: https://i.imgur.com/kqYxKa9.png
As you can see, some countries are doing very well, while others are not doing anything at all. Please be aware that the number of impressions shown in the examples are far too few to get a clear picture of how a campaign is performing.

Let's go even further... now I want to see on which publisher placement's my campaign is doing well: https://i.imgur.com/HnGeOnp.png then we will see this: https://i.imgur.com/bBC43rW.png for this example the campaign only went live on 1 placement.

Here we look at how each banner has performed: https://i.imgur.com/CgymFU2.png again, this is way too few impressions to get a real picture of the performance - but you get the idea I hope. As we can see, banner ID 270 is getting us a ROI of 35.38%

Let's examine banner 270 some more: https://i.imgur.com/hfUum4e.png and let's not forget ID 271: https://i.imgur.com/vKkiALO.png

Based on the reports, simply edit your campaign in order to make it as profitable as possible. Creating similar campaigns based on what we have learned, can also be a good idea.

And finally: https://i.imgur.com/9IBsExh.png here we see freebitco.in campaign grouped by "Placement" had the ROI been negative, I can block the campaign from showing on Placement ID 62.

Enough about reporting for now Cheesy

We also offer re-targeting and action tracking, both methods require you to have access to place a pixel on your website. If you have such access, you can also buy traffic on CPA/CPL - you can set up to 5 action pixels in order to track different actions.

Black and white listing of placement ID's are in the works and will be complete soon, by creating such lists will you enable you to target specific ID's based on previous results. For example you did a campaign for faucet referrals and had good results on ID 62, 113 and 345.

You can then create a white list and add those 3 placement ID's so when you do a similar campaign, you can target those campaigns from the beginning of the campaign. If on the other hand you had terrible results on ID 3, 48, 72 and 86 you can add those ID's to a black list, meaning next time you create a campaign, those 4 ID's will not serve your campaign.

So how much does all this cost and how much can you earn?

Let me first explain how our server works... We have what we call an "eCPM optimizer" the optimizer monitors all campaigns on each placement ID and for each country - in real time. Once per hour it re-calculate how well each campaign is doing and re-calculate the eCPM for each ID and for each country. Let me give a few examples;

Campaign A is a CPC campaign paying $0.10 per click.
Campaign B is also a CPC campaign paying $0.08 per click.

Both campaigns run on placement ID 62 for example. Campaign A receives an average of 1 click per 1000 impressions, making the eCPM $0.10
Campaign B receives 4 clicks per 1000 impressions, making the eCPM $0.32.

In the above example campaign B is more profitable for the publisher (and us) which is why priority will be given to campaign B on placement 62. And this also happens for each country.

CPL/CPA and CPC campaigns will only show to each user once per 2 hours, this is to prevent wasting a publishers traffic with campaigns that don't make him money. CPM campaigns are capped at whatever the advertiser set, when creating the campaign.

So if an advertiser have a very clickable banner, he can get away with a lower CPC and still have first priority.

This post became way too long but I hope that I explained it well enough for you to realize the potential - if you have legit traffic of course.

We are not officially open for business yet, our front page is still a mess and there are a few bugs here and there that still need to be sorted.

For now we accept a few more publishers with quality traffic and good placements. The ONLY way to get approved is by talking to support on http://theconnect.io/ all other signups will be ignored. Please don't bother to contact us if your site is one big banner farm or have pop-ups. We have no traffic requirement as such.

We have a list of 20-25 paying advertisers waiting to get going. Our first tests with them showed an eCPM of around $0.30 to the publisher. Our own tests all gave active referrals and various faucets and faucet games. We have gotten conversions on poker sites, lending platforms and other sites, which requires small investments.

Minimum payout is currently $25, with BTC fee paid by the publisher. We might add XRP in the near future, or a currency supported by coinpayments.net

Thanks to those that actually read it all Cheesy