Paid Ads on Project Wonderful

johndanims 2015-10-22 15:14:05 UTC #1

So I've used Project Wonderful for a while now on and off, getting a bunch of free ads as I don't really have a lot of disposable income at the moment to pay money for the ads and I wouldn't be getting anything back in return from visitors anyway. What I'm wondering though is if anyone has graduated from the free ads and onto the paid ads, or even just tried paying for a short time, and if so, do they see a noticeable difference in the traffic it brings in over the free version? What are your techniques when choosing the paid for sites? Are you more choosy as to where you put your money? What do you see as a good budget to spend, on how many sites and what kind of traffic they pull for themselves and how it translates to clicks to your own site?

johndanims 2015-10-22 16:36:14 UTC #2

Also wondering how far my money could go. Say if I was to put $5-$10 into it how far would it potentially go to maximise output. How many ads would it get at what prices and how long would it last?

winglesscomic 2015-10-22 17:11:37 UTC #3

I have a paid ad campaign I turn on from time to time when I have some disposable income, at a limit of $10/day. All the times I have ever used it, I have seen a substantial increase in readership; however, your money will go really fast if you want the best exposure. If you configure it to bid aggressively to keep your position in high-ranking webcomics, that $10 will be gone in just a couple of hours. My CTR tends to be .10-.20% in this campaign.

It can be a rip-off sometimes, paying a high bid to a site that has many impressions but no clicks, so to make the best of your money you also have to curate your bids constantly and ban the sites that waste your money consistently.

I have another campaign, my "Poor Man's Campaign", where the limit for that is 10¢ a day. this obviously means that 90% of all my bids are on low-ranking sites, which is a big hit or miss because you can't ascertain the quality of their adspace unless you are actively curating all the bids your campaign is doing. So like you could be paying to bid on a site that has their adbox at the literal bottom of their site, waste of money. This doesn't really happen on high-ranking sites, but if you're looking to target the bottom fish for low cost and maybe a couple of clicks here and there, it's something to watch out for. I get some very small trickles of clicks from this campaign, but it's hard to actively judge if those people are recurring visitors because the size sample is so small.

Also, this article may help too.

PotooGryphon 2015-10-22 17:41:09 UTC #4

Yes, I've transitioned from free to paid ads. My strategy though is to test a site with a free ad or minimal bids, if I get results, I friend the poster and build up a list of successful sites that I can go back to and bid on and know I'll get results.

The design of your ad plays a big role in click throughs. If you're noticing a whole bunch of nothing on every bid, try redesigning your ad into something more appealing, ask friends and trusted people their thoughts, and re-bid with the new ad.

A good budget to have for ads is more than I could currently afford. My budget is based on my returns from my own site's ad boxes. Everything I earn through PW I spend back into ads. I haven't yet added my own money to the site in the year I've been there. It's all on what I earn.

Your views/clicks/bids depends on the sites you bid on, your ad design, and the relevance of the site your bidding on. If you have a fantasy comic, bidding for ad space on a sports site won't help at all. Stick to bidding on similar sites to yours, because they'll most likely have an audience that'd be most interested in your comic.

eschaefges 2015-10-23 05:50:13 UTC #5

Just tried PW for the first time - @CyndiFoster your tutorial is amazing. i did 50 $0 bids myself then decided to throw $5 and see what the campaign could do... i'll see what happens in a few days i guess!

johndanims 2015-10-23 10:55:05 UTC #6

Thanks for the info guys, some interesting information.

@winglesscomic, when you say you limit it to $10 a day are your ads only up on each site for one day or do you take the 30 day option on any of the sites and include that in the $10 limit on the day you post the ad?

@CyndiFoster, I've seen your tutorial on free advertising before, it was very helpful when I started posting free ads, thanks for it. As for the design of my ads, my only series right now, by it's nature, has a very sketchy style to it so I feel it's difficult to create an ad that's particularly eye catching without creating some false advertising and getting the clickers hopes up and the ad should reflect the style that they are getting at the end of it. However I may look into redesigning some new ads since I have more content to use now. I currently mostly use my series' logos to advertise except on the skyscraper ad where I added a few of my doodles along with the logo.

@eschaefges, let us know how your $5 goes.

winglesscomic 2015-10-23 15:28:19 UTC #7

What I mean is that my campaign's limit is $10 spent on bidding at all per day. If I go past $10 spent on bids, then the campaign will pause itself and all my bids will either pause or cancel until PW rolls over to the following day.

PotooGryphon 2015-10-23 16:05:58 UTC #8

Definitely recommend constantly trying new things with your ads. On my latest versions of my ads, I've tried adding a bit of slight animation to it and tried a less is more approach.

Old ad design:

New ad design:

(click on the image to see the animation)

Since using the new ads, I've gotten better results on click throughs, new people commenting on my webpages, and returning readers.

Granted, my comic isn't in color and there's no animation on my series so the ads may be slightly misleading in that sense. However, ads like these help build interest and hopefully enough that they'll actually check it out/give it a try. At the end of the day, that's all I'm asking from an internet user with my ads.

I actually have a library of different ads on my PW account too, and I like to mix them up, try several different ads on one successful site and see what works best. Try try try

AlkseeyaKC 2015-10-23 17:00:49 UTC #9

My personal experience is, I've broken about even on adds on other comic sites. The ad on my comic site could keep feeding me advertising on another comic site.

I did find a sweet spot, I would save up to $10 or more. You see on Smack Jeeves scroll down to the ad between the Latest News and Similar Comics. I have done awesome there. But it eats up money. I tend to bed whatever the lowest on the 30 bid cart. Then my ad gets posted at random when bid sinks to that.

That's just whats worked for me. lol

eschaefges 2015-10-26 00:11:20 UTC #10

Yeah, i used existing art for my first wave of ads, just to get them up quick and see how they'd do, and so far $3.50 has gotten me about 40 clicks, 15000 unique views, and 81000 total views... i may have to draw some special stuff up like you did with your banner.

aspiderjonny 2015-10-26 05:50:46 UTC #11

I didn't even know you could do animations for PW ads! I'm gonna go redesign some ads, guys!

PotooGryphon 2015-10-26 05:55:43 UTC #12

Oh totally you can. @Sketchmazoid did a really cool animated ad for Project Wonderful.

Just make a backup still image ad, in case the site you want to bid on doesn't accept animated ads.

Sketchmazoid 2015-10-26 07:44:45 UTC #13

If you want to do an animated ad you have to make sure you write it's a comic somewhere in there clearly, or people will assume it's an ad for a browser game.

johndanims 2015-10-29 19:33:38 UTC #14

Going by @CyndiFoster's tutorials, what kind of alterations to the search criteria would be recommended when going for paid for ads?

PotooGryphon 2015-10-29 19:40:44 UTC #15

Current Bid = How much someone is currently bidding on it
Minimum Bid = is the minimum amount the poster allows you to bid on

If you have a $1 a day budget (or more) you'd like to spend you can use these two fields to find an ad or two within your budget.

So what you can do is in the Current bid, input $0- $1.00 with a Minimum bid of $0-$0 to get all the ad boxes that are currently under $1 with no minimum bid limitation. To limit it to comics, size, and SFW be sure to look at the other tabs.

johndanims 2015-10-29 20:04:21 UTC #16

Cool, thanks. I have experimented a little with the numbers in the past when doing the free ads but it can be hard to figure out what's best to put in there for the results you want.

I haven't ventured out into the paid ad world yet but I did just do a few ad redesigns (with more focus on graphics than the title) to test out different ideas and posted out a few more free ads to see how they get on.

eschaefges 2015-10-31 04:00:06 UTC #17

okay, so i am on my eighth day of ads. I have had a clickthrough rate of $0.04 per clickthrough, and it SEEMS that a decent amount of them are trying out my comic. The button and the giant skyscraper get the most hits but the others do well too.

Most days in the last 8 had decent numbers, and wednesday someone liked a bunch of my pages, i got featured on the front of Tapastic again, and i shot up to a whopping 497 views (my previous high was 282). My first $5 was worth it and my second $7 (in a more focused campaign, targeting the areas that got the best results) seems to be doing well. Thanks so much @CyndiFoster!

PotooGryphon 2015-10-31 06:57:17 UTC #18

Yay! So happy for you! Those are some awesome numbers. Let's keep it going up! XD

Another thing to keep your eye on in Project Wonder after bidding on an ad box is tracking the performance of these following fields:

Total Page View = How many times your ad has appeared infront of a person on that website
Total Clicks = How many of those visitors to that site have clicked on your ad
CPM = (Cost per Mille) the advertising cost per thousand views (think of it as an estimate of what you'll pay for 1k views from that site)
CPC = (Cost per Click) An approximate cost of how much you're paying for 1 person to click on your ad from that site.
CTR = Most important I think (Click-through rate) is the average number of users who click on your ad out of the total users who view the site with your ad on it.

So my general rule of thumb is, if my CTR for a site is below .20% it's not worth it anymore and it's time to retire my ad from that site for a bit and try another site where I'm going to get a better click-through rating. You want high percentages on your CTR stat, low CPC and CPM are a plus, and a decent size Total Views.

Before bidding on a site, it's important to check out the site's stats to determine what days of the week will be best to place an ad on the site, what location you should bid on, what their average traffic looks like, and where most of their traffic is coming from to get as many views for your ad on that site as possible.

My goal with these ads are to get as many people to click through on my ads for as little cost as possible, and using all these stats/factors help me to determine what sites are worth it and what aren't. [*It's an excellent idea to mark down the sites that are working for you for a quicker easier effective ad campaign]

eschaefges 2015-10-31 16:00:14 UTC #19

yeah, so far i've been letting PW calculate most of that 'intelligently' in a campaign but am taking notes on the best Cost per Click and best Total Clicks for the sites they choose so i can refine it further in a future update. They generally seem to find what works and put more money into it, and pull out of ones that don't work as well.