Ok, so the other day I signed up for three new ad programs and my last few posts have been giving some initial thoughts on each of the programs. So far, I have given my initial thoughts on Infolinks and my initial thoughts on Market Leverage, which means there is only one program left to talk about. The program that is the focus of this post is PerformancingAds.

If you read the posts regarding those other two programs, you may notice a generally positive feeling towards the programs and the way things have been going with them. However, my initial feelings and thoughts towards PerformancingAds are not anywhere near as good.

The sign-up process went pretty smooth and the confirmation email came right away. As soon as I signed up, my account was instantly active and I was able to start creating regions and implementing the program on my site. However, this was pretty much the end of the postives with this program.

Everything seemed to be going well except that the message said that the changes I made (adding a new “region”) would take a few minutes to take effect but it was really more like a day or so before the ads actually started appearing on my site. In the meantime, I was wondering if everything was working correctly or if there were some problems with the way that I had added the code to my theme.

I looked around the website and tried to find a bit more documentation and some additional information and didn’t find anything. In fact, I wouldn’t hesitate to say that the entire help section of the PerformancingAds site has less text than this post. Needless to say, this wasn’t very helpful and I still wanted more information.

Since I couldn’t find the information that I was looking for, I figured that it might be prudent to contact them and ask a few questions and learn a little more about their program. I decided the easiest way to do this would be to call them and be able to get instant information and be able to ask whatever questions I happened to think of…but then I couldn’t find a phone number anywhere on their website.

This led me to try their email contact form and type in my questions and ask if everything was correct. The next time I checked my computer, I still had not received a response, but the ads were displaying as I thought they should so I didn’t worry about it too much.

Now that I had the ads running, I decided I should play around with their site a little bit more and see what I could find/learn. I created a couple of placeholder ads and an advertisement of my own to use as an exchange ad. While their ad creation page doesn’t work quite the way that I would have liked, it was functional and I will leave that out of this little rant.

After I created my exchange ad, I had 25,000 credits automatically and after learning a bit more about the program changed my ad region from a 2×1 to a 2×2 so that I could display some exchange ads and earn more credits. After making this change, the change in region size was reflected on my site in a relatively timely manner (probably like 10-30 minutes) and all was well…almost.

I waited about a day before getting too concerned that my site wasn’t showing any “exchange ads” in my ad region. For those who don’t know, exchange ads are ads of other members of the PerformancingAds network; these ads show in your unbooked ad spots and earn you credit towards your ad being shown on other people’s sites. The next day, when I logged in to check on everything, my site wasn’t (and still isn’t) showing any exchange ads. Also, my exchange ad credits were gone so I now had 0 and in the details showing where my ad had been displayed, I clicked through and saw my ad being displayed 4 times on the same page at the same time in different “ad regions” all down the sidebar!

In reference to these complications with this program (especially the fact that I currently have a hole in my sidebar where an exchange ad should be displaying with each page load and am not earning any exchange credits) and my concerns, I once again decided to try and contact them and get some clarification. I filled out and submitted the email form on their website and still haven’t received a response.

As if these problems were not enough, I have also noticed that my site seems to load quite a bit slower now that I am running PerformancingAds. It is as though the site loads to the point where it calls for PerformancingAds and then has to wait for awhile for that to load before continuing to load the rest of the site.

I know I have heard positive things about this program from several other bloggers and that a lot of people like it, but from my experience I don’t think I will be recommending it to anyone in the near future. If you want to try it for yourself and see if you have better luck than I have had, go ahead and sign up for it. I think I’m going to give them until Friday to at least get back to me and hopefully get some things straightened out. After that, I will likely remove that piece of code from my theme template and put my “Supporters” section back to 4 spots all sold through my advertise page or given away in promtions.