AOL updated interface same bad results

[Discovery]

AOL has rebranded their 20 armed monster formerly known as Quigo, Adsonar, Advertising.com and more.

They added a number of desperately needed features to the online app including the ability to Geo target your ads.

Creating and managing ads is still a nightmare that can only be done via a spreadsheet and help to upload from an account representative.

We had a great deal of success with Adsonar/Quigo in 2008 and 2009. Even shifting some of our budget away from Google to this platform. Much of the success was due to a few premium properties.

AOL home page
AOL finance Homepage
AOL Personal Finance Homepage

Unfortunately these pages were removed from their offerings and we were left with testing out their other properties.

After a few thousand dollars almost 8,000 clicks we had a 100 or less conversions nearly all of which were bogus. The secondary properties were worthless. The main reason is AOL had allowed so many poor advertisers to run ads... Million dollar mirical job, Mom discovers teeth whitening solution for a dollar you know the type. It is an assumption, however we are fairly certain that as soon as our ads ran in a premium spot, we were hammered with clicks from the competition. With no help at Adsonar we dropped the campaigns altogether.

In October of this year we leared AOL had taken over the platform, cleaned up the app, had added the GEO targeting and raised their editorial standards. They would no longer allow the bottom feader ads.

We tried it again with a very small test.
200 clicks on 7 placements
We had 0 conversions.
Avg page views 1
Avg time on site under 2 seconds
Avg bounce rate 99.8%

So the results tell it all.
If you are considering using AOL or Advertising.com I would tell you not to. If you decide to anyhow, be weary and run SMALL tests and grow in small increments.

Did you have any positive experiences with AOL adverstising?

[SEORockStar]

Even I don't see any improvements in ASK.com as well I am least bothered about this crap Search engine