Vizu Answers: Monetizing Your Site With Polls

Vizu Answers helps you earn extra revenue from your site by placing interactive Polls on desired topics, instead of text links or graphic ads that irritate your visitors. They pay you based on CPM (Cost per thousand impressions) just like Tribal Fusion, and you even get to set the minimum CPM rate for each poll you put up on your website. However, remember that Vizu will take 50% of the CPM rate you set. So if you set $2 as the CPM rate for your poll, you earn $1 for every 1000 times your Poll is displayed.

Vizu will always try to maximize your rate and will automatically raise it to meet strong demand. If you are unsure about what price to set, Vizu recommends charging about what you earn for an individual ad unit in a similar location.

When there are no paid Polls, a link to Vizu Answers with text “Your Market Research Here” will be displayed and the rest of your content will slide up. An advantage of Vizu Polls is that your visitors will not have to leave your site after participating on the Polls or to see the poll results, unlike in other advertising networks.

Screenshot of a Vizu Poll

Placing Vizu Polls on your site

To place Vizu Polls on your site, you have to create a custom Vizu Poll Zone choosing topics that categorize the content of your site and set your own CPM rate. You can customize the appearance of your Poll like colors and width to completely match the look and feel of your site. The Poll Zone can be from 150 to 300 pixels in width.

After you setup your first Poll zone, you will be given a code to copy and paste onto your site. If this is your first time running a Vizu poll, it may take up to 4 days for your Zone to become active and available to Vizu’s clients for purchase. During this time, Vizu will run some basic polls to characterize your site’s audience and demographics (age, gender, income, etc.) which makes your Zone more attractive to Clients. You will not be paid for these poll impressions but will have access to the data collected on your site audience.

When do Vizu Answers pay you?

Vizu will pay you at the end of each month via check or paypal as long as you have earned at least $50 in your account.

Vizu Poll Zone Tips

These are some of the good tips I collected from their Poll Zone Tips page:

• The most important way to ensure the profitability of a Poll Zone is to make sure your Poll Zone generates the maximum amount of votes possible. High vote-rates make your site much more attractive to clients and therefore increases the amount of revenue your zone can generate
• Place Poll Zones near the portions of your site that attracts the audience
• Since Polls vary in height depending on the amount of answers and inclusion of images, make sure the area where you place a Poll Zone has some vertical flexibility
• Separate Poll Zones form banner ads and other forms of solid content to generate a higher vote-rate
• Placing Poll Zones towards the top of the site yields a higher vote-rate than those placed further down
• As the position of the Poll Zone shifts right, the vote-rate will generally decrease
• Adding a “Polls”, “Poll of the Week” section, or a “Please Vote” tag above your zone can be a good way to call attention to the poll and increase your vote-rate

How is Vizu Answers useful to Advertisers?

For Advertisers, Vizu Answers helps them easily get the answers they need by placing interactive polls on sites that have the type of audience they need. Once their poll is posted, the responses arrive in real time. Click here for more info.

My Thoughts

I like Vizu Answers because

• it increases interactivity on my blog
• it does not take my visitors aways when they participate in the Poll
• it allows me to set my own CPM rate
• it lets me easily customize the Poll to match the look and feel of my site

What I don’t like about it is that advertisers won’t choose my blog when I set a CPM price like $4 and above (this can vary on different sites). It works best when I set the CPM rate to $2 (meaning I only get $1 per 1000 impressions).

I also won’t be able to modify the Poll topics (until I contact them) once my Poll Zone’s categorization settings have been reviewed. I get this message- “Your categorization settings for this Zone have been reviewed and locked by Vizu Answers. If you wish to change your settings, please contact us.”

When there are no paid polls, the text “Your Market Research Here” is left behind, which I find annoying.

Also, they don’t always display Polls on topics that you select while setting up the Poll Zone. Recently I got polls related to Valentines day. It may affect user participation, if the poll topic is not relevant with your niche.

What do you think about Vizu Answers? Do try them out and come back here to share your experience with it.