Infolinks vs Kontera - Which is Better for In-Text Ads?
I’ve been thinking for a little while now about putting in-text ads on some of my new sites. I didn’t spend too much time looking for who to use before I came across Kontera, as they seem to be one of the most popular out there.
So, I signed up and as soon as my account had been approved I applied the code to a couple of pages. Now, while I do like these ads and think they could probably be a good compliment to affiliate links and adsense, I have one issue with Kontera… it just takes soooo long to actually show the links on my pages. It can take 10 seconds or more before any of the text is turned into links. Now maybe that’s not so much of a problem, but it does bug me a little bit and I wonder whether that delay can mean missed clicks.
Then I came across this post about Infolinks. Paul seemed very impressed by Infolinks so I figured I’d give them a try and signed up. Yesterday my Infolinks account was accepted and so I swapped the Kontera code with the Infolinks code on the pages I’d had it applied on. The first thing I noticed is that the links are applied extremely quickly, within about 1 second (so much faster than Kontera). The only trade-off as far as I can see so far is that when putting the mouse cursor over a link the ads take a little while to load (about 1 second) compared with Kontera’s ads which show instantly when you hover over a link. Both solutions seem to offer relevant ads for the keywords they link from, so apart from the speed there doesn’t seem to be too much else between them.
From my limited experience of both systems so far, I am definitely going to be trying Infolinks ahead of Kontera. I think that the fact that all the links appear very quickly after the page has loaded is so much better and I hope will lead to more clicks than if I was using Kontera. You never know, I might find that they don’t convert very well and then maybe i’ll give Kontera a try.
Do you have experience with in-text ads? Care to share your thoughts?
