Taglines Tutorial

Cubics / Adknowledge is proud to present the release of Taglines for Cubics.

Taglines is an existing Adknowledge technology that can be used for monetizing e-mails sent. The basic premise is simple: send an e-mail via taglines and we'll paste an ad from one of our advertisers at the end. Here's what it looks like:


The Taglines product is generally offered in partnerships with large web sites, but Cubics is bringing this technology to our independent publishers.

How do I get this working with my app?
There's really only three steps:

1. Sign-up for Taglines account via the Cubics interface.
2. Paste in our Taglines helper code.
   
3. Modify your existing e-mail code to include the call to Taglines.
   

So first, log in to your Cubics Publisher account and click on Place Ads on the navigation bar. Select the Facebook option and then Taglines and then Next Step >> (as in the image below).
You'll then be taken to the Taglines screen, however you're not yet signed up for a Taglines account.
Click on the button marked Enroll in Taglines Now to activate your account for Taglines. The system will automatically enroll you for the Taglines account and will then return with a screen like this:
Scroll down to the bottom of the screen and you'll a text box with your code. The code has two parts: some placeholder variables and an e-mail helper function, as below:
The code is heavily commented, but the fundamental piece is this. Copy the sendEmail() function into your PHP code and then use this function to send future e-mails.

How does this make me money?
How do I get paid?
Simple really:

1. You send e-mails to user (using our Taglines code above)
   
2. User clicks on ad
3. Taglines pays you directly into your Cubics account.
   

Once you've signed up you can go to your Reports screen and you'll see a link for Taglines Reports.
Taglines is a CPC network, so we'll track clicks and let you know your CPC and your earnings for each day. You can run both Cubics ads and Taglines and we'll pay out earnings from both to the same account. So you'll get paid just like you always do (check or Paypal).

Who's advertising on this?
Our Taglines team has a dedicated sales team and several developers who have been building the product over the years. Some of the advertisers may coincidentally overlap those advertising via Cubic's banners, but we're definitely pulling from a different pool.

What type of eCPMs are we going to get?
What do we make per click?
Who knows? Adknowledge has done lots of Taglines, but they've never done it through Facebook, so we don't have any eCPM numbers. The CPC is going to be variable like it is in all of the advertising spheres. So the only way to find out your number is to try it out.

Let's look at it this way.

How much money are you making right now from sending e-mails?
Probably nothing, right?
So "something" is definitely a step in the right direction.

Can we do this?
Adknowledge's Tagline product is fully CAN-SPAM compliant. For the conspiracy theorists out there, we are not storing personal information from your users. What we're doing is providing you with a way to mitigate the cost of sending e-mail updates by placing ads at the bottom of the e-mail.

Quick Questions

• Support other than PHP: not yet. Cubics is developed on the .NET platform, so we have the .NET knowledge, but the majority of our publishers seem to be using PHP, so we're starting there.
  Please let me know with a comment below if you're interested in the .NET version (or the Java version or the Ruby version...)
  
• How many e-mails can I send?
  Facebook has specific limitations about the number of e-mails you can send to your users. Please adhere to whatever guidelines they have set.
  Remember, this is a Pay-Per-Click setup, if you send e-mails that just get ignored then you won't end up with any clicks, so it's your best interest to ensure that e-mails are getting read.
  
• Where are my stats for today?
  Stats are being pulled from Taglines server, but there is a delay. Your stats will not be updated hourly, we're expecting delays of a day or so. We have to wait for people to read and click on the e-mail, this could obviously be a few days for some people.
• Is it just text?
  Taglines does support an HTML i-frame mode where we could stick images, but it's just not available via the current Facebook API. We're looking into it, but for now it's just hyper-linked text.