You would think that viewers would be more likely to click on shiny, animated banner ads, but text ads are still hugely popular and in a lot of cases, more effective as iPerceptions found out.

We have received a number of enquries about providing a self serve interface for text advertising and so today we are launching support for text ads within the Shiny Ads self serve advertising platform.  A web publisher can now select an ad zone/placement that is designated for text ads only and can also design the HTML template that will be displayed with the advertiser-supplied title, description and URL.  When an advertiser visits the “Advertise Here” self service interface, they are presented with a clean and easy interface to build their text ad, instead of the display banner builder.

For the last 3 weeks, our self-serve advertising interface has been asking advertisers specific questions about the ad purchase process. Shiny Ads has been metrics tracking in places for months now, but until now we didn’t know why users “dropped off” the sales cycle.

Today, we made available 3 key pieces of feedback so that our publisher can make the appropriate changes to their pricing and media kits and increase their conversation rates:

• Was there enough information in the media kit?
• Was the price reasonable?
• Was the pricing options easy to understand?

The advertiser interface is now capable of being viewed in Spanish and soon other languages will be available.

We are happy to have deviantART.com launch their Shiny Ads implementation after a couple of weeks of testing. deviantART.com is using Shiny Ads to allow their artists to advertise their artwork on the site in a 300×250 sidebar ad unit.  Their pricing model is CPC and their pricing options range from $20 to $1,000.

They are also using a new beta feature of Shiny Ads that allows them to “skin” the advertising interface to look like the rest of their web site.

You can see it at deviantart.com

It has been a great month and half since we opened up Shiny Ads to our beta testers. Based on the feedback, we have expanded the functionality and of course fixed defects.

For example, we now support multiple pricing models. Different web publishers charge different rates for their ads. Some charge on a CPM (impressions), some on the number of days, and some on CPC (clicks) basis. Sometimes ads are exclusive: no other advertisement can be sold for days already purchased. We have also added support for a CPM bidding system that is similar to Google AdWords and gives a higher priority to ad purchases that come in at a higher CPM rate.

Dogbook (& Catbook), a very popular Facebook application, is now accepting advertising orders right inside their Facebook application using Shiny Ads’ advertising widget.

They embedded the advertising interface right into the Facebook application and thus it looks like it is part of their own interface.  They are using a product list of packaged impressions.

You can see it in action here.

An advertiser can now select their geo-targeted cities by using our auto-suggester input field.  The cities correspond to the cities available in the OpenX MaxMind geoIP database; 2.2 million cities.

This allows local advertisers to geo-target the correct cities and not worry about spelling mistakes.

Welcome to Shiny Ads.

We have opened up to publishers who wish to beta test our self service advertising platform.  Register here.