Advertising opportunities

[Gibson]

I hope this is in the right place. I was just looking over my Project Wonderful ads and realized that there are a lot of spaces available in the European and Worldwide regions on Pictures of You's Rectangle ads that are empty, and sometimes Canada as well. Those ads can be won for free right now, so I thought I would throw the knowledge out there to anyone who could use a little free advertising. This isn't a link exchange, it's just full-on free advertising. Go to the Pictures of You site and click on the "Advertise here" link, or just go straight to the details page and bid $0.00 for those regions, and it shouldn't ever cost you any money to draw a few clicks.

Anyone else with a similar situation, feel free to share!

[Alectric]

Ah, actually, Project Wonderful doesn't allow bids of 0.  1 cent is the lowest you can go, which I honestly think is a good thing, so that people are forced to actually pay for advertising (from an ad host's point of view).  You still don't pay if there's no competition for the ad, but if there is, and they bid 1 cent also, you then start paying 1 cent per day.  And based on my recent advertising experience, it's not worth it.  I try to stick to advertising with an effective cost per click (unique) of less than 5 cents.  I also try to avoid advertising that amounts to less than 6 unique clicks per week.  If you don't have much of an international readership, then you might as well just come up with some decent default images to display.

[TTallan]

No, you can bid $0.00. I've done it many times (and also just yesterday, in fact). The only caveat is you have to limit your bid to 2 days at most.

[Gibson]

There are $0 bids on my ad boxes right now, so as TT said, you can do them. I'm not really sure I follow your argument about one cent ads and cost-per-clicks under five cents. A cost-per-click of five cents is actually really expensive. At a penny a day, a single click has a cost-per-click of one cent, and in fact one click in four days is less than five cents. It sounds like you've had a really unfortunate advertising experience.

I do have a default ad that links to another of my comics, I just figured other folks in the community could benefit from this, if only in a small way.

[Alectric]

Oh, I didn't know about the 2 day limit, that might explain it.  But then, if you get 1 click every 4 days, having to go and redo your bids every other day for that really doesn't seem worth it.  And those types of ads would fall under the "less than 6 unique clicks per week" condition of mine, not the "more than 4 cents per unique click" condition.

[Gibson]

Why is doing something that takes less than 10 seconds not worth it for free advertising? And why are you stuck on this idea that there's a limit on how many clicks you'll get? There are no guarantees with advertising, especially not with Project Wonderful. You could get one click, you could get zero clicks, you could get hundreds, you never know. The point is that this is free, no money, all you have to do is place the bid. Even if you only get two days, you look at the response after two days and if it's good, you repost the ad, if it's not then you don't. I've never had to convince someone to take free advertising on my site before.

[Nuke]

Man, I'm a cheapskate. My *only* rule is less than a penny a visit. Hehe.

Oh, by the way, I've got free spots open I believe on Canadia and Europe Land. Get 'em while they're not hot enough to sell!

[Rob]

Gibson you shouldn't really be all that surprised by this. Project Wonderful and advertising in general but PW specifically are pretty complicated. I've been using it for over a year and I still don't get all of the way it works.

Alectric you are missing the point here though. The way PW works you can get "free" advertising. It's one of their biggest draws. They say it very plainly in their intro article. If you are saying it isn't worth your time to rebid every two days then that's your call. But there is no way for you to know how many clicks you will get (unless you can see the future in which case a) what are next weeks Powerball numbers and b) why didn't you warn me about my poor career path) until you actually place the ad and try it.

Gibson has a reasonably popular comic running about 11k views of his current ad boxes so even though the vast majority of those are in the US and Canadia, the free ads are for Europe and the rest of the world, there's a good chance you may see some good response.

Then again you may get diddly. But you won't know until you try. He's getting a combined 1200 page views and 800+ unique (a day and most recently not averaged) users combined from those areas and that's nothing to dismiss.

I will say this, whenever I run a campaign involving free or 1 penny advertising I spread a wide net and don't bother with individual sites. I drop $20 or so into the pot, set up the campaign to cover as many sites as possible (that may be related) and then let it run until the money's gone.

I've never paid a penny a click using that process. It's usually half that much and often a third. And since my site makes about $20 every other month (and that's with me not really even updating right now) I'm basically just putting that money back into the system.

[Gibson]

Yeh, campaigns on PW confound me, and the couple times I tried them the advertising seemed much less effective than when I've placed the bids myself. It does take some effort to be really on top of running your own PW campaign, but it can pay off. There might be a better way to use them than I have, but the automated campaigns seem to spread it everywhere without much concern about time or relevance. It's been much better for me to pay attention to the kinds of sites I'm bidding, the times when they get heavy traffic, the location of the ad, and how likely my work is to appeal to those audiences.

I've also found that watching the bounce rate through a stat tracker is more important than the cost-per-click. You could be getting a thousand hits at a cost-per-click of half a cent, but if only one in a hundred is sticking around to read it, it's not as effective as 10 hits at a 5 cent cost-per-click where everyone stays to read.

[Alectric]

Then again you may get diddly. But you won't know until you try.

That's the thing though.  I DID try, or several other sites.  And based on the results, I really don't care to try on any others.  Unlike you, I'm not really making any money with my site, so I have to be conservative with the ads I bid on.  But you guys don't have to try to convince me.  If you're right, then I'm sure there are others who would find it worth it.

I've also found that watching the bounce rate through a stat tracker is more important than the cost-per-click. You could be getting a thousand hits at a cost-per-click of half a cent, but if only one in a hundred is sticking around to read it, it's not as effective as 10 hits at a 5 cent cost-per-click where everyone stays to read.

Well, Project Wonderful doesn't offer such a thing, so cost-per-click is all I got.  The whole point of my advertising, though, is to choose sites (webcomics, really) that are similar enough to mine that people are likely to stay after clicking.  Besides, I would imagine that most people take a look through my archives a bit before deciding to follow my comic or not.  I know I do that all the time.  In this case, the bounce rate wouldn't be very useful.

[D.Z.]

I will say this, whenever I run a campaign involving free or 1 penny advertising I spread a wide net and don't bother with individual sites. I drop $20 or so into the pot, set up the campaign to cover as many sites as possible (that may be related) and then let it run until the money's gone.

I've never paid a penny a click using that process. It's usually half that much and often a third. And since my site makes about $20 every other month (and that's with me not really even updating right now) I'm basically just putting that money back into the system.

Rob, would you mind sharing exactly what parameters you used to get these results? (size of banners, choice of sites for campaign, etc...) I can get 2 or 3 clicks per cent by advertising at one of the best positioned, most-popular sites (Misfile is an -excellent- choice, the banner is placed right next to the comic), but campaigns usually bring me up at more like a click every two cents. Since there's only so much you can milk a single large comic, I'd love to hit some smaller markets--that usually costs more, but according to you, not. So what parameters do you use?

[Rob]

You'll have to give me a little time on this but I'll add it to my to do list and get my settings in here when I have a chance. Sorry I'm crazy busy right now.