Swollen Pickles

As I covered yesterday, Infolinks appear to be a decent alternative to Kontera. The only problem is, their dashboard is a little light on for information, and makes it easy for people to miss some of the more useful information that they have on customizing Infolinks to get the most out of them on your site.

To find the code you need to include in the footer of your site, you need to click on 'Implementation Guide'. Once there, you have the option of copying the 'Express Installation' code, or an example of an 'Advanced Installation' code. Express is fine if you want to get things up and running and don't mind using the default parameters, but if you want to specify the number of Infolinks that will appear on a page, or help Infolinks better target ads to your content, then the 'Advanced Code' is the way to go. If you're worried about the term 'Advanced', don't be. There's nothing all that scary about it.

Here's an example of the advanced code:

As you can probably tell, this allows you to modify the link color and text color. But there are also other parameters you can modify using the same principles. Here are two of the most useful.

So you want to limit the number of Infolinks that appear on your site?

To do this you'll need to add the variable called infolink_anow. For example, if you only want a maximum of 5 infolinks to appear on a page at once you would add the following line to the advanced code just before the first closing script tag.

var infolink_anow = 5;

So that will limit the maximum number of phrases that Infolinks will underline.

So you want to specify the phrases/keywords that Infolinks will target for linking?

Same principle as above, except you'll need to add the infolink_cat variable. The infolink_cat variable can only be used/populated with the twelve categories listed below:
Adults
Arts
Automotive
Business
Computers
Games
Health
Home
Kids & Teens
News
Recreation
Reference
Science
Shopping
Society
Sports

Say, for example, you wanted to target the keywords belonging to the arts category you would use the following:

var infolink_cat = 'arts';

To summarise

If you wanted to add both the above variables, your final code would look something like this.

So that's it. Hopefully someone finds it useful. If you haven't already, go join Infolinks here.

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Battle of the content links

I've been using Kontera content links on a few sites for some time now, and whilst they haven't exactly set my little money making world on fire, they have proven to be a slow and steady little earner. Up until recently I'd been under the apparent misapprehension that Kontera were the only player in the content links market, but apparently I was wrong. After some research in forums I found that there was quite a bit of buzz surrounding Infolinks, with people suggesting they paid better than Kontera. Being a natural born sceptic, I decided to take a look myself.

So here's what I did. I ran Kontera on this site for five days, then switched to Infolinks for five days. Here's what I found.

Kontera (18-23 November 2008)

Total revenue: $1.83
CTR: 1.70%
CPM: $0.35

Infolinks (25-30 November 2008)

Total revenue: $3.16
CTR: 1.45%
CPM: $0.54

Kontera links seem to load up slightly quicker than Infolinks, but based on the figures above, Infolinks have the edge in terms of CPM. Kontera seem to have the edge when it comes to reporting, and I have multiple sites setup with Kontera, whereas I'm not sure how to add sites to my Infolinks account (I haven't discovered if that option exists). Both companies have a $100 minimum payout threshold, so there's no difference there.

I may try the same experiment on one of my other sites to see if the results are the same... if I can figure out how to track individual sites with Infolinks that is.

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