Pulsepoint CPM Program Review

Features, Earnings Potential, and Payment Reliability


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Pulsepoint, formerly Contextweb is an excellent CPM advertising program. It works with nearly any other ad program to ensure that web publishers make the most money possible. In this review, I'll summarize the benefits of using their program and how you can maximize your income.

Pulsepoint Publisher Requirements
In order to join, you must have an acceptable looking site that features plenty of original content. The content must contextualize and fall into one of their many categories. If you feel your site is turned down unfairly, you may be able to appeal to them through emailing Customer Service.

The application process can take a couple days, and all sites on which you implement the ad code must be approved. This ensures that only sites of sufficient quality can publish their ads, which in turn improves advertiser faith in the program. Webmasters who get turned down can file an appeal, and the company is generally fair in their asessment of your site. As of the time of this writing (6/15/11) there's no minimum traffic requirement to participate, although they appropriately favor approving sites with quality content.

Pulsepoint Helps You Maximize Revenue
Pulsepoint's primary selling point is that publishers get to set the price. This means that pretty much every publisher on the web should be using them. You set a price higher than you'd earn on your backup, and if they can't meet it, your backup will be displayed. This will slow the site down a tad, like any ad network, but the earnings should make up for any minor hit you take in pages per visitor. If it's not, you might try to set your price a little higher.

Payment Schedule
Pulsepoint operates on a net 45 schedule. That means you'll get your money about 45 days after the end of a month. It's annoying waiting it out the first time, but after that you'll have a steady stream of income coming in the middle of the month, every month. They can use EFT (direct deposit), Paypal, or even mail you a check the old fashioned way.

Fill Rate
Your fill rate is the percentage of your ad inventory that is sold by Pulsepoint. Fill will be higher on sites with more U.S. traffic. Improving fill means lowering prices. They fluctuate constantly, so you need to be proactive. Log in daily and see how things are doing. Toward the bottom of this review I'll post some tips to improving fill.

Performance Price
When Pulsepoint can't sell an ad to a particular visitor, it will attempt to sell your ad slot on one of their many partner networks. This feature is known as Performance Price. When you set up a backup tag, you can tell their system how much that backup tag earns. If they can't sell it for a price that beats the backup, it's passed down to the backup you set. All this usually takes place in less than a second. I can't think of a reason not to use this feature, since you're in complete control and can set the prices as high as you need to in order to outperform your other ad programs. You can block out networks that serve ads you don't like through their acceptable interface.

CPM - Pages or Unique Visitors?
Pulsepoint pays by the page load, but won't pay out when users rapidly change pages. They sell mostly to U.S. based traffic. So, sites that see their readers gobbling up information and surfing to dozens of pages are going to benefit most.

Pulsepoint vs Adsense
People wonder how Pulsepoint compares to Adsense. The truth is, it isn't a very intuitive question. So long as you set your prices higher than you earn on Adsense, you can outperform it. That applies to any advertising network, CPC or CPM, that a Webmaster might be using. Just be sure their terms allow them to be used as a backup. Adsense is my backup of choice, but you may want to use a more CPM-driven network. It all depends on your site and its niche. Honestly, Pulsepoint is so great that if my ad network for some reason wouldn't allow me to place their tag as a backup I'd drop 'em like a bad habit.

Adsense is a great network, often displaying relevant ads based on the text of the site. They're my backup of choice for this reason. These two programs happen to play very well together, as Adsense terms do not allow you to run ads that look similar. Pulsepoint is all about high quality image-based advertisements. There are dozens of other programs that you can use which allow their ad tags to be placed as a backup, but Adsense will be the most common choice.

Ad Rotation
Pulsepoint will let you set up multiple backups for a single ad tag. You're able to tell it to split the impressions 70/30, 50/50, or however you choose. This is a good option for keeping your ads fresh, assuming you even use multiple backup programs. It'd be helpful if you had sold some ad space and wanted to guarantee your customer their ad would be shown so many times. I myself never need to use this, as I don't sell advertising directly that way.

Pulsepoint Tips

I thought Webmasters coming here would appreciate me sharing my experience with this program. Here is some wisdom that should help you maximize your earnings. You'll get better at adjusting prices and improve your money earned.

Improve Fill: If you are not selling enough of your inventory at a set price, you might want to set your price lower. Go to all your backup tags and make sure that the prices you're charging for Performance Price are set fairly. This feature shouldn't be overlooked! It's one more layer you can utilize to maximize revenue.

Another tip to improve your fill rate is to try to use one of each type of advertisement. Pulsepoint uses 728x90, 300x250, and 160x600 ads. If you have one of each, these creatives won't be competing against one another. It's worth it to reorganize your site a bit in order to get that third ad unit.

Don't place too many ads. For one thing, it turns off visitors. You'll see diminishing returns when you have ad units of the same size, and it will slow your site down even more. Remember that visitors don't like incredibly slow pages, and will back out ensuring you don't make so much as a penny. I'm not aware of any limit, but you would not want to exceed three or four ads per page. After all, you can only have three adsense units on a page anyway, right?

Place your ads "above the fold". This means you should have at least one or two of your ad units at the top of the page, so that it's a guarantee the visitor will see it. This will improve your fill rate and clicks. Higher click through rates will encourage your site to sell even more ads. After all, if a visitor goes to that site they will be more likely to buy or request whatever's being advertised.

Price fluctuation must always be monitored. Once every day or two, you should log in and make sure your ads are selling at a set price. If fill is really high, you might even improve your profit by setting the price even higher so you get more impressions to your backup/performance price tags. You can sometimes get ads sold for a dollar, two, or even more per thousand. The profit potential here is crazy! I won't talk about my own numbers, but I'm a very satisfied publisher.

Your fill rate will be determined by your site's category and other factors like click through rate, and the ad unit size and loation on the page. Some Webmasters will do much better than others. It all depends on what advertisers are targeting what niche at the time. Holidays make a big impact on fill rate, as you might expect. Be sure to check things out when a holiday is coming up and stay on top of it. I've made changes to my prices during an advertising boom that I suspect increased my profits by 20% or so, just from stopping in to make a couple of tweaks. These tweaks take effect pretty quickly, so you can adjust things on the fly.

Sign Up for Pulsepoint
I started using Pulsepoint a couple years ago, when it was still known as Contextweb. I've been a happy user of this program all along. Payments come reliably (maybe off by a day or two) and they've never ripped me off. In fact, I have seen adjustments made to my account that increased the earnings I was to be paid. If you've heard enough, use my referral link to sign up. Referrals give both the new member and the original publisher 10% increased income for their first full month of use, so you're not just doing me a favor!

Sign up now! If things work out for you, feel free to drop me a line at [email protected].
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