Project Wonderful Advertisement Pruning

February 23, 2008 | Author: Rob | Filed under: SEO and Marketing

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

In every advertising campaign there comes a time when it’s time to do some pruning. You’ve tested a large array of sites and some simply aren’t producing so it’s time to cut them out of your budget.

Being a Saturday that I’m still feeling maybe 60% even though it’s been a week I figured it’s time to do something I really dislike doing. Go through statistics and find out my referral traffic stats and identify the performers and the losers in my latest Project Wonderful campaign.

Believe it or not I’ve identified some blogs that I’m paying an average of 3-5 cents a day and getting ~10 uniques a day with incredibly low bounce rates. Other ads that I’m spending 20-40 cents a day have sent me 7 visitors in the last 24 days with almost all of them coming one day with a 20% new visitors… I think the webmaster just clicked my link a few times one afternoon because the bounce rate was also 100%!

If you don’t go through and tweak your online advertising campaigns you run the risk of quickly using up your reserves. By doing these few checks I’ve removed a good number of what I refer to as deadbeat advertisements. Nothing against the sites just as far as bringing you quality traffic they simply don’t cut it.

I’ve freed up ~$4-6 a day from my ~8-16$ a day Project Wonderful campaigns. I’ll probably try some other new places and evaluate them at a later date; keep the good ditch the bad repeat. Eventually you’ll have a good group of advertisers that actually bring you quality visitors. What I’ll do is once I get it down to a good core group I’ll bid higher to ensure I”m always on them. I’ll talk another time about the flip side of that technique which is making tones of low bids so that when “serious” advertisers stop or there is a valley in the revenues your ad may squeeze in there off and on at a severely discounted price.

If you’re running some online campaigns you should definitely be using google analytics. Every few weeks open the analytics software and begin to look at the stats. The crazy thing is reality is often so different then what your assumptions are.

When you have a campaign with dozens or hundreds of ads if you are sort of lazy my advice would be to quickly go through your most expensive ads and make sure they are performing before worrying about the small ones. You can fix 15 small ads and your savings may be smaller then identifying one big ticket ad that isn’t doing well and correcting that.

My question to you is when is the last time you did ad pruning and by doing so have you ever made any discoveries that you had to see to believe?

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 23rd, 2008 and is filed under SEO and Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1 person has left a comment

I actually took PW off of DatMoney.com because I sold that spot on my ad for my monthly rate instead of hoping for some people to “bid” on it.

Honestly, I almost feel that PW is not worth it. Well, that’s why I took it down… and the fact that someone purchased that spot lol.

Jay

Jay wrote on March 1, 2008 - 8:05 pm | Visit Link

feel free to leave a comment

Comment Guidelines: Basic XHTML is allowed (a href, strong, em, code). All line breaks and paragraphs are automatically generated. Off-topic or inappropriate comments will be edited or deleted. Email addresses will never be published. Keep it PG-13 people!

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>

All fields marked with " * " are required.

Join me on PLURK
Join me on Twitter

Disclosure Policy