The Project Wonderful scheme seems simple enough on the surface. Publish other people’s ads on your site, earn a bit of cash, spend that cash to publish your ads on other people’s sites. However, even with the relatively low costs involved, Project Wonderful is still an advertising game and figuring out the rules isn’t always easy. So, how do you get the best return for your money? One method I’ve had some success with is something I call the Research Blitz. Before I go further, I want to caution that this is only one technique. Advertising is as much art as it is science and different methods work for different people and products.
To execute the Research Blitz, you take a small amount of seed money and buy as much advertising as you can in a single, twenty-four hour period. Make sure you pick a day when you can continually monitor your site’s statistics. Start your campaign off with relatively broad parameters. For example, I usually pick only webcomics and only those webcomics with a unique visitor count of more than 1000 a day (Since PW seems to have a habit of roughly doubling a site’s unique count, this means I’m really picking a unique visitor count of about 500 a day). I also tell PW to bid aggressively, which means it will bid several levels higher than the current bid in order to avoid being outbid. Finally, I set the advertising campaign so that it spends no more than $.30 per advertisement. That’s currently the maximum I’m willing to pay for an ad over a single day.
As the day goes on, monitor what’s happening. I recommend using a metrics service other than PW, though. Sitemeter is free and will show you where each visitor has come from and how many pages they browsed during their visit. Google Analytics will give you the same basic information. Sitemeter is easier to read, I think, but only gives you details on the last one hundred visitors (unless you are using their paid service, I believe). Google Analytics isn’t quite so easy to read but will show you the entire day.
When monitoring your metrics during the Research Blitz, pay attention to which sites bring in more traffic and which sites bring the most in depth traffic (that is, traffic that actually takes the time to read your webcomic and browse through your archives). Visit those sites, note which of your advertisements is running there and what that advertisement’s location on the page is. Most importantly, make notes of all this in a text file, spreadsheet or on a piece of paper. Write something along the lines of: Starship Moonhawk/button ad: 32 visits, 15 in depth visits.
Adjust your advertising campaign as the day wears on. If you notice that your square ad isn’t bringing in much traffic but your button ad is, maybe you should eliminate your square ad from the campaign in order to reserve more money for the button. If specific types of websites are bringing in the visitors, narrow down your field of possible publishers by using keywords. You might even want to try switching out ads to see if, for example, one button ad brings in more traffic than another. Monitor your spending. If you’re running out of funds too quickly, adjust your maximum bid downward. Don’t be alarmed if you have fewer and fewer winning bids as the day goes on. This seems to be a fairly normal trend.
Once the campaign is over take time to analyze your data. First, pay attention to general trends. Which types of sites brought in the most in depth traffic? Gag-a-day sites? Fantasy sites? Which type of ad did people respond to most? Your button ads? Banners? Towers? Try to keep proportion in mind. Chances are, you ran more button ads than anything else, but did your single tower ad get a lot of visitors considering it was only on one site? If you want to get really in depth, do a time analysis to see what traffic was like from hour to hour. After that, look at specifics. Which sites brought the most traffic? Was that traffic shallow (people came, looked around for a second, and left) or deep (they came and read through a good portion of your archive).
Using the information you’ve gleaned from the Research Blitz you can develop a more comprehensive advertising strategy. If you have a fair amount of money to spend, you can create more targeted campaigns. For example, if you discovered that you did very well with buttons on gag-a-day comics that get at least 1000 unique visitors a day, you can create a campaign to run button ads on all the gag-a-day comics with at least 1000 unique visitors. If your funds are more limited, you can pick out the top two or three performers and do specific, targeted advertising on their websites.
Don’t rely on just one blitz if you can help it. Running one once a month will give you more data to work with and help ensure that the information you’ve gathered wasn’t a one day fluke. It will also help you notice trends as your comic and other websites (and their audiences) change over time.
I’ve had success using the Research Blitz. Remember, no strategy is foolproof and every method should be tailored to your own particulars. Make sure to pay regular attention to your PW account to ensure that you aren’t wasting your money and getting the best return on your investment. Good luck.
This is a great article, J! I’m definitely going to try it.
some great advice…. *signs into PW*
Sounds more in depth than what I’ve done in the past. More broad. I’ll give it a shot.
People trying this need to keep in mind that if everybody follows the exact same strategy, you’ll drive up prices on 1000+ hit/day sites and miss out on a lot of ads with great cost/hit rates in the sub-1000 range. Stratify, setting one maximum bid for the 1000+, a lower bid for 500+, and another for 200+ — for example. Use Frumph’s or our numbers for examples, not the exact numbers you should each use for yourself.
The Llama dude’s absolutely right. Don’t just do things like I wrote. Find the method that works best for you.