Since the introduction of PPC roughly a decade ago, there have been many companies that have attempted to innovate on the fundamentals of pay per click advertising. One of these innovations has been in-text advertising which includes companies such as Infolinks, the market leader, and Kontera. However, over years of trying to use and monetize from Infolinks, I have found it has never been as good as PPC. Since using them, Infolinks has continued to innovate on PPC to create other products which aim to gain a high conversion rate while reducing banner blindness. For this reason, should advertisers and publishers start to try and use in-text advertising and Infolinks?
 
 

Publishers

The main problem I found with Infolinks as a publisher was that I didn’t think it was healthy for my blog. Infolinks works by highlighting keywords in your content and if they are clicked by the web user it will take them to the advertiser’s landing page. This does mean that for old visitors, they will lose trust in internal links in your content which can significantly increase the bounce rate of your website.
 
Upon the popular ‘intext‘ product, Infolinks now has three more:

• insearch which displays a banner at the bottom of the webpage relating to what you searched to get to the current page.
• intag which is a banner displaying keywords to do with the content you are reading.
• inframe which uses the left and right side of the website to display an image advert.

I find that the problem with these products is that it does not reduce banner blindness (the ability to ignore adverts because they look like adverts). intext might not have banner blindness but the rest will. As well as this, the CPC per advert is ridiculously low when compared to PPC programs such as Adwords. Infolinks are trying to compete with PPC. But, in doing so, they are making online advertising much more complicated and are taking up even more space on a webpage with their products.
 
 

Advertiser

The one positive from Infolinks is that the CPC is rather low compared to PPC. This does mean that you will be able to gain much more impressions on your landing page with the same budget with Infolinks than with PPC. However, to what quality impressions are you gaining?

• Google Adwords has millions of publishers worldwide with many of the top websites on the whole internet using them.
• Infolinks claims to have 100,000 sites worldwide spreading across 128 countries.

Right there is the problem. In order to gain high quality visitors to your landing page, you need a large pool of high quality websites to pick from. With Adwords, this is possible. But, 100,000 sites worldwide is just not big enough to cover every topic/category/genre of advertising campaign.
 
Saying this, with Adwords, you tend to have to look to the internet for PPC tips and help since Google can become difficult when it comes to customer support. With Infolinks, if you have a budget of over $10,000, you will gain personal assistance from one of their account managers to help you start up your campaign.
 
So should advertisers and publishers use Infolinks? Not yet. It is clear they are trying hard to compete with PPC on both the advertiser and publisher front. However, in-text advertising is just not big enough to put all your eggs in one basket yet. If you are to try out Infolinks, it would only be out of curiosity like I have done.