Information Madness

Ever since Yahoo bought stake in Tyroo in a bid to expand ad network, I thought of giving Tyroo a try for my website here.

While Adsense is a contextual advertisement, Tyroo is a category based advertisement. So you can run Tyroo and Adsense together. So I selected couple of categories from the list and generated code to put it on my website. Tyroo does give you an option to customise the look and feel of your text ads. One thing I noticed is that, in the color textboxes you can not enter your hex code, you need to pick it from the palette. (Well you can always change it once you generate the code)

After running Tyroo ads for about a month on my website, I am concluding that the average cost per click I am getting is about Rs. 4. Sometimes you get around Rs. 8 or Rs. 10 per click but that is rare. My CTR is about 0.19%, while I get around 8-9% CTR in my Adsense. The reason for this?

Well I found out few issues with Tyroo Advertisements which I would like to comment on.

• The categories are not working the way it suppose to. If you select a category "Entertainment", you might see advertisement from "Education" category as well. When I asked Tyroo team about this, they said advertisers sometimes choose their advertisements in multiple categories. So technically, there is no point in selecting a category for your site as you might be served a different category advertisements.
• Even though they are growing, they don't have lot of international advertisers, which gives you a "Blank" ad block for your international visitors. So if your visitors are from Germany and if Tyroo doesn't have advertiser from Germany, your site will have a blank spot and this way you are loosing an opportunity of a potential click.
• Ad block customization is not that great. It is sometimes difficult to customise the ad block according to your website's look and feel.
• Text ads are weird. Sometimes you see the keywords in your text ad headlines. something like "{keywords:Mircrosoft Office}". This will not attract your visitors to click on it.
• They don't have lot of text ads servings. Most of their ads are banner ads which makes it difficult for publishers to generate high CTR.

So this is my first run on Tyroo ads. I am still waiting to reach the maximum amount that they pay out which is Rs. 2,500. So I am going to keep it running for sometime. I will keep you guys posted if I find any techniques, tricks to enhance the performance of Tyroo ads.

But one thing is sure that Tyroo is the only company (and thats my opinion) which can be a good replacement of Google Adsense if your visitors are only from India. They still have to work hard to get their nuts and bolts together to compete against Google Adsense.

Meanwhile, if you are running Tyroo ads and would like to comment on this topic, you are welcome to do so by commenting on this article.