Both Advertisers and Website Publishers are interested in what ads perform best. While this changes over time, here is a snapshot of what is currently the best performers. We recommend that both advertisers and publishers read over this information and use it to their advantage to increase the performance of their ads and ad spots.

Size Matters

The best performing ad size is the Leaderboard (728 x 90). Coming in a close second is the Medium Rectangle (300 x 250). Both advertisers and publishers should see good performance from these banner ad sizes.

Location Matters

Where a banner ad is placed is perhaps the most important factor for maximizing the rate that visitors click on it. The best performing ad zones are placed at the top of the page. Following the top of the page is placement close to prominent content, such embedded within the text of an article. Placing ads in sidebars or away from prominent content has only mediocre performance. Finally, ads placed at the bottom of pages is the worst performing spot – we don’t recommend placing ads at the bottom of your pages.

Advertisers: Use Low Inventory Banner Ad Sizes

The most popular ad size in use by publishers is the Leaderboard (728 x 90). On the other side of the spectrum is the Rectangle (180 x 150). Create a Rectangle ad and you’ll be greatly increasing your exposure since there is currently a very low inventory of this banner ad size.

Advertisers: Support All Banner Ad Sizes

There is no penalty for submitting multiple banner ads for a specific campaign. We recommend that advertisers submit one banner ad of every size for each ad campaign. This will ensure that your ad campaign is considered for display in every ad spot across our network. If you only submit a single banner ad for your ad campaign, your ad campaign will not be considered for display for any ad zone that is not of that size! You’re losing out on impressions in this case.

Now that we are well into the process of celebrating the Easter Triduum (Holy Thursday through Easter Sunday), let us not forget the reason we are first and foremost Christians. This remembrance of Easter and all it signifies is the pinnacle of our Christian and Catholic faith. May Christ’s blessings and graces be with you this Easter.

For those website publishers with an earnings balance of $25 or more as of March 31, 2010 your earnings have been deposited in your account and are now available for withdrawl.

Any advertisers looking for a banner ad size that has availability should consider creating Rectangle (180 pixels  x 150 pixels) banner ads.

We currently have several thousand extra impressions for Rectangle banner ads that could be filled by your ad each day.

If you are already running a campaign, all you need to do is create a Rectangle (180 pixels x 150 pixels) banner ad and associate it with your existing campaign and your banner ad will start being displayed on the sites that feature ad spots of that size.

An example of a Rectangle banner ad looks like this:

Website publishers: your earnings will now appear in the Funds section. Click on the Funds tab to view your earnings. Earnings are updated once per day. Any earnings that available for withdrawl (any earnings over $25 after each calendar) will be shown as part of your “account balance” which can be withdrawn at your request.

Advertisers: your remaining account balance will now appear in the Funds section. Click on the Funds tab to view your current account balance. Your account balance and charges for clicked banner ads are updated once per day.

If you have clicked banner ads for a day, you will see a charge listed once per day shown as a payment transaction deducting money from your account balance.

There was a short outage tonight from about 9:30 pm – 9:40 pm CST. As soon as we were notified by our monitoring system within minutes of the outage we resolved the issue with one of our servers and were down for no more than 10 minutes. We apologize if this short outage caused any issues.

Are you a company trying to reach out to faithful Catholics? If so, our online advertising network will get your message to your target audience.

We are now accepting banner ads to run across the Catholic websites who are members of our Catholic ad network.

Best of all it is super easy - you can submit your banner ads using our website. The payment process is convenient. We use PayPal. The approval process is quick and once approved, your ads start running across all the websites in our ad network within minutes. It’s all automated to ensure the process is efficient.

We offer reporting on your banner ad performance that is updated every hour. You’ll be able to see the number of banner ad impressions, clicks, your average cost-per-click, and more.

Introductory Pricing

We are offering special introductory pricing for all ad campaigns created before the end of April 2010.

Concerned about spending too much? Our pricing model is a “pay-per-click” model where you pay only when your banner ad is clicked on. We have 3 tiers of prices and our introductory rates range from 24 cents per click to 30 cents per click. The difference in price determines the frequency your banner ad will be considered for display in any one ad spot on a website.

You control your budget! You select a daily maximum number of clicks. Once your ad campaign hits this number of clicks, your ad campaign will automatically stop running for the day. This lets you set a maximum budget you want to spend each day.

Your price is locked in for the life of your ad campaign. If prices go up while your campaign is active, don’t worry, you pay the same per-click price you specified when you created your ad campaign.

What Happens After the Introductory Pricing Expires?

After April 2010 our pricing will change to automatically adjust based on demand. When demand goes up, our prices will rise. When demand falls, our prices will be reduced. This automated price adjustment based on demand allows us to price our advertising at fair market prices.

Your ad campaign prices are always locked in! This rising and falling in price only affects new ad campaigns. Once you create an ad campaign, the price you choose is the maximum price you will ever pay for the life of the ad campaign. If our prices fall below your ad campaign’s price, you will pay the lowest price.

Questions?

If you have any questions, simply contact us.

We recently launched the ability for website publishers to view the performance of the ads running on their websites. When viewing the list of your websites you will notice a new link named Stats. Click this link to view advertising performance metrics about each of the Ad Zones on your website.

Even though the advertising statistics feature was just recently released, the statistics data goes back to the date your Ad Zones were created. Statistics for the current day are updated hourly.

Please note that these statistics do not include any free charity ads that have run on your site. Since we are just beginning to sign up paying advertisers, your site will show zero views for each day that statistics are available for. Once paid ads begin running (see below for more information), you will see numbers going up.

This roll out of advertising statistics also paves the way for us to allow advertisers to submit their paid ad campaigns. The ability to report on ad performance was the last major feature to implement before accepting paid banner ads from advertisers.

We are hoping to begin accepting submissions from advertisers the week of March 29, 2010. It has taken us a little longer than desired to get to this point, but we’re very happy to be at this point and excited for the future of our Catholic advertising network.

A big thanks goes out to all of you who have been patient and supportive of this effort so far. We’re almost there!

We’ve fixed the issue causing Internet Explorer users to not be able to register. You can register new accounts now using Internet Explorer. (On a technical side note, the fix involved upgrading to the latest version of JQuery and JQuery UI).

For you Internet Explorer users out there thank you for your patience and for sending us the information that helped point towards the root cause.

We are currently working on resolving an issue with registering new accounts when using some versions of Internet Explorer.

A work around for this issue is to use a web browser other than Internet Explorer, such as Firefox or Safari.

For those of you who have experienced this bug, we appreciate your patience and are working to resolve it. For those of you who have contacted us about it, we will send you a notice by email as soon as it is fixed.