Independent Widgetbucks Blog

Seems like there’s a lot of chatter going on around WidgetBucks right now, and some of it is not accurate. If you look under the hood a bit, most of the inaccuracies have largely been precipitated by those who have a vested interest in competing products. Hey, I’m all for talking up your product — but let’s at least try do it with a little integrity. I personally feel that execution and performance speak for themselves.

Now to dispel the rumors:

First of all, no, WidgetBucks was not banned by Google SERPs. I recognize this bursts a great Google-smack down storyline here, guys. Sorry. [Read more →]

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As we’ve continued to evaluate impression, click and conversion data during WidgetBucks’ first 3+ weeks, we’ve observed that a majority of non-English language sites are delivering a consistently low conversion rate. With our merchants and advertisers predominantly based in the U.S., this is not a surprising phenomenon. And as an advertising network, we have a responsibility to our merchants to deliver quality traffic that has the highest likelihood of conversion to sale.

As a result, we’ve updated our program policies to no longer approve or accept non-English language sites into the WidgetBucks ad network. See our Program Policies here. [Read more →]

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One of the concerns we’ve heard from many of you has been the slow loading times of our widgets. We really appreciate your feedback and comments in helping us improve in this area. So, today we addressed this issue by rolling out new code that ultimately delivers faster loading widgets.

It is very important to note that this update will require action on your part. You will need to update code of your existing widgets for the speedier load times to take affect on your site, blog or network. Know that changing the code will not impact earnings for any of your widgets.

Here are the two steps you’ll need to follow: [Read more →]

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As WidgetBucks has launched, we’ve seen tremendous growth on our network and one of our big concerns as a PPC widget is click-fraud. Naturally, we have systems in place to detect click-fraud to ensure that it does not impact our advertisers and, in turn, the entire network of our thousands of publishers.

When our systems flag accounts with 10%, 20%, or even 90% (one customer even had 99%) of their clicks to be potentially fraudulent, we feel it’s important to move swiftly because we take it seriously.

Going forward, as potential-click fraud is flagged within an account, we will issue an email with a three-day warning. This will allow time to dialogue with a publisher over the suspicious activity. [Read more →]

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We have added two new ad sizes on WidgetBucks, giving publishers and bloggers more options for their sidebars. Rolled into the fold is a 160×300 sidebar size, essentially a shorter, more “vertically-challenged” version of the original 160×600 wide skyscraper size. The other new size is a more narrow 120×600 skyscraper. Later this week, we’ll be adding a few new creative options in 728×90 and 300×250 sizes.

We’ve also incorporated 11 new categories, including Green Living, Oprah’s Book Club, U.S.-Made Lead-Free Toys, and just in time for the campaign trail, popular Left and Right Wing books (in separate categories, of course). The Green Living category includes a few so-called “cradle-to-cradle” items which are getting media attention lately, kind of Green 2.0, while recent toy recalls should make the lead-free toy list popular to visitors. [Read more →]

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Summary: WidgetBucks continued to refine its reporting system today by adding “My Bucks,” a new feature/tab that gives access to monthly account balance, earnings, $25 sign-up bonus and payment history, and by updating the “My Widgets” page to reflect a total of real-time earnings for all active widgets.

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We have just rolled a couple updates to our reporting system, including the creation of “My Bucks,” a new tab within a publisher’s account that displays a monthly view of:

- Total account balance
- PPC earnings for previous and current months
- Referral fees for previous and current months [Read more →]

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