Vertical ad network SureHits has launched a Quality Engine that will adjust the rate advertisers pay publishers based on a calculation of the quality of traffic. Rather than paying publishers a flat rate, SureHits will pay publishers more if they send SureHits higher quality traffic. And, advertisers are given a discount if the quality of traffic drops below what they initially bid.
” The strategy is to offer advertisers a cost-per-click environment that automatically adjusts for the quality of the traffic they receive,” said Jon Kelly, president of SureHits. “It offers almost all of the benefit of a cost-per-action model without requiring all advertisers to install our tracking code. On the publisher side, we pay each publisher for the traffic quality they produce. That’s a big incentive to deliver quality traffic to our advertisers.”
The SureHits ad network is designed specifically for insurance providers and mortgage and auto lenders. The company utilizes a blind bid model where advertisers are charged based on a combination of their bid and the quality of the traffic to their site.
Publishers benefit by monetizing superior traffic from their sites, and advertisers secure more qualified leads as prospects have taken several steps before reaching them, effectively weeding out generic traffic.
With the SureHits Quality Engine, more popular offers will tend to rise to the top of the list as consumers vote with their click behavior. This will then encourage advertisers to produce better, more enticing offers for consumers.
“The Quality Engine tackles an issue that has been vexing the online advertising industry – how to account for differences in traffic quality across different publishers,” Kelly said. ” The search engines that have syndicated their listings have really struggled with it – both Yahoo and Google have limited discounts they give to advertisers based on traffic source. But, we’ve taken it much further – we are monitoring a significant share of our traffic, so we can pay publishers with very high quality substantially more than those with low quality. That gives us the benefit of being attractive to the highest quality publishers, as well as giving the lower quality ones an opportunity to participate.”
