Everybody Wins — that’s the headline on the home page of Project Wonderful. Billing itself as an online advertising broker, Project Wonderful allows publishers to find advertisers and advertisers to find publishers. A bonus, we think, is you can be both publisher and advertiser with just one account.
Project Wonderful was kind enough to do a Q&A with Indiepreneur about online advertising. Here are a few basic tips to get you started advertising online.
Indie: Why is internet advertising a good idea?
Project Wonderful: The number one reason internet advertising is a good idea is that it’s where everyone is. More and more people are turning to the internet rather than newspapers and radio for their day-to-day information. People check out a couple of headlines for the overall news and then turn to their favourite selection of blogs to connect with what real people are feeling about life and current events. Instead of evening relaxation being solely focused on television, more and more people are playing games, chatting in forums, and reading articles online.
Looking at this trend, I would say that any business that wants to expand their customer-base should look into online advertising. This is especially important for businesses that operate online.
Indie: Is it cost effective?
Project Wonderful: The question of cost-effectiveness is less cut-and-dried. I don’t think online advertising is more or less cost-effective than elsewhere. It’s important for a business to think about their goals and how much a new customer will earn them over the long run to determine the budget and type of advertising.
If your business is looking to build a steady consumer base that will turn to you regularly, a more long-term ad campaign could generate familiarity – make your business come to mind when the ad isn’t around. If the business is more geared toward one-time purchases, then highly-focused short-term ads might perform better by grabbing the customer’s attention immediately (although some repeat exposure can attract those who dismissed the ad when they first saw it). If the margin on your product or service is low, you’ll need to plan for lower-cost advertising. If the margin is high, there more room in the budget for advertising.
The cost effectiveness of an ad comes down to how well the approach and the budget worked. This will depend more on how well you match your ads to the target than whether you reached them in the newspaper or the internet.
The benefit with doing this online is it becomes a bit easier and faster to judge the success of an approach, allowing you to make changes to the advertising sooner! If one group of sites is performing better than another, you could shift a bit more of the budget to the strong area to target similar sites. Or, you could create a new ad to better engage the readers on the lower-performing sites. How do you do this with a newspaper or a flyer?
Project Wonderful gives users a lot of flexibility in their advertising. Advertisers can choose their own spending limits and bid according to their budget. In addition to hand-placed bids, there’s a campaign system that allows the advertiser to set up criteria about the types of sites to target and overall spending targets. Nothing is locked in permanently, so if an approach isn’t working with some sites, those bids can be cancelled. A new ad can be put together and new bids can be placed at any time. Even in the campaign system, individual ad boxes can be included or removed as needed.
Indie: How does an advertiser find sites to advertise on?
Project Wonderful: This can vary depending on the system used. Some publishers take on advertisers on an individual basis, some advertising networks use keyword matching. Project Wonderful has a searchable publisher list. It’s possible to target particular audiences by the category of the publisher’s content, tags used to further describe the content, traffic statistics, average bid levels, or even the distribution of site visitors by country.
From the search results page it’s possible to look at individual ad box statistics, go visit the publisher’s site personally, or even set a campaign based on the matches.
Indie: What are the basic steps necessary to get started advertising on Project Wonderful?
Project Wonderful: Getting started with advertising on Project Wonderful is really easy:
1) Sign up for an account at http://www.projectwonderful.com/signup.php
2) Upload the graphic you want to use in your ad. Here it can be a good idea to have a couple of sizes available to target different areas of the screen. Wide boxes tend to appear at tops and bottoms of pages, while squares and skyscrapers are more common beside the main content.
3) Deposit your starting funds into the account. This can be done through PayPal or by credit card, starting at the “my funds” page. The minimum deposit is $5, so it can work with virtually any budget. (It IS possible to place bids for free, but they must expire within two days and are often quickly outbid. Someone trying to promote their business is better off even with a modest advertising budget.)
4) Search our publishers at http://www.projectwonderful.com/adsearch.php.
5) Place a bid!
Indie: What are a few frequent mistakes made by newbies to Project Wonderful?
Project Wonderful: 1. Raising bids to win on a particular site
One mistake that can get new advertisers into budget problems is raising bids once they are outbid.
To understand how this can be a problem, let me explain some of how our system works. Project Wonderful operates on an Infinite Auction. It’s a lot like eBay’s model, but continuous as long as the ad box exists. The high bidder at any point is the one whose ad appears. Bids can be cancelled, or expire because of a time deadline or reaching a spending limit.
Like eBay, our system uses proxy bidding. This means the advertiser tells our system the maximum price they are willing to pay for the ad to appear on a site. (The bids are placed as a rate per day, to eliminate click-fraud that can get expensive for advertisers.) The high bidder only pays enough to win the auction – one increment above the second-highest bid. The actual maximum of the current high bid is not publicly available, as is standard with proxy bidding.
Sometimes, if a new advertiser is outbid right away, they get emotionally caught up with wanting a particular ad spot and will raise and re-raise the bid in case they can win it with just a little bit more. This can cause a problem with the overall budget, though, if the company can’t afford to get traffic at that rate. Sure, the ad is now showing, but it may now chew too deeply into the income a new customer will bring.
My best advice for a new advertiser is to know and respect your spending limits. Every ad box has public statistics showing daily traffic and average daily bidding levels over the past month. The price at any given time may be higher or lower than what’s on the graph. If you leave the bid at what you can afford, the space may become available later on and you won’t blow the budget!
2. Bidding continuously on a tight budget
This might not be an issue specific to Project Wonderful, but should still be helpful for businesses starting to advertise online. A lot of businesses with a small advertising budget will break it down to a daily expense and maintain long-lasting campaigns at very low bid levels.
Imagine someone who can spend $0.50/day on advertising and sets up ongoing bids on five sites at $0.10/day. (Assume for this example they have the high bid this entire time.)
This maximum bid could be outbid rather easily, severely limiting exposure. Maybe the sites in this price range don’t have the perfect audience, or maybe the full audience has been reached. Quite a few advertisers have noted that response rates tend to drop after a while anyway – readers have visited the site, feel they understand what it’s about, and don’t need to respond to the ad anymore.
In some cases, it might be better to save up that budget. $0.50/day works out to roughly $15 in a month. Now, instead of spreading those funds over the whole month, imagine spending that budget in a three-day campaign! It might be possible to place a $3/day bid on one popular site in the centre of your business’s niche and have $6 left to place smaller bids on other sites including those five you might have targeted with the long-term campaign. The difference is the readers haven’t seen your ads in a while and might be more interested in finding out what you’ve got to offer.
This isn’t to say that long-running campaigns can’t be useful. There are bloggers reporting good results on standing campaigns with tight budgets. It might be worthwhile to run something like this with part of the advertising budget, but saving up to run a blitz now and again can expand your market in areas normally out of reach.
Indiepreneur is a Project Wonderful publisher. Our 4 boxes on the sidebar to the right is just one size scenario available. In addition, we sell boxes to individual advertisers that run above the Project Wonderful boxes and in the header — when not sold, we run Google Adsense ads on our header as well as on the sidebar and below individual post pages.
We welcome information about other advertising programs used by Indiepreneurs. Indiepreneur is always accepting articles. Please email us.
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