Paid Advertising

[Spincus]

it was 53 degrees this morning. woot!


Impressions
It is all about impressions :) There is a thread started in our forums by Pam Hawk of Pass it on Plates, discussing Project Wonderful (PW).. To get up to speed, check out this thread.

Pam's defined market is a bit different than most artist because she has defined a whole new market niche. She has to deal with both eduction and availability at the same time for her defined market segment. It is very doable, but a bit more challenging. I am of the opinion that Pam needs to get in front of influencers first, then market availability. Influencers are blog writers, magazines, reviewers, that type of thing.

Any ways Pam did the ground work on PW and got me interested. Please note, the PW site works best with Explorer and not so well with firefox.







. Get to the influencers, they will teach the market place about your wares.


Here are some of my early thoughts on PW:
ok first off, it should be noted that the bidding increment is for 1000 page views or what is commonly called CPM (cost per 1000). This is bidding for views, not clicks. The goal is to get clicks. if you bid on a page at .05 and only 200 views happen in a day, you will get billed .01 for that day, since only 20% of the 1000 view rate was hit. This is a very fair way for them to have set up the costs.

Testing sites is very important. If something cost .50 cpm but you get 50 clicks, that is cheaper per click than something that cost .10 and you get 1 click.

It will take a while to find the sites that work best for your products, and do not forget, your add will effect this also, and needs to be tested. If you have a decently presentable add to start with, add testing can wait till after you have found a good site, with plenty of views and clicks.

Here is my current square add: It is simple, clean, uses attractor colors that I know work, visible form, easy message, and more importantly I know what the response on Etsy is to this when I advertise through renewing. So I feel that testing of the image will be only a moderate exercise.

Right now I want to find sites that convert to clicks. I plan on changing this image to have it have a simple glowing animated single sparkle. Folks respond to movement, and I can use that in moderation and really make this add pop to attention on a page. I personally do not like the heavy animated adds and turn off to them quickly. But done discretely and minimally i expect decent improvements in results relative to a static image.


My first early take on PW is it is a bit confusing, but after a while you can wade through what is happening. Keep the CPM in mind, and the average daily visits to the site you are testing. You want to find sites that result in the highest possible click / view ratio per CPM. In other words, we are trying to find out the best possible cost per Click in the long run with the lowest cost per click. I do think that the minimum bid part of PW needs to be revamped badly. They have a lot of unused property out there.

We want to find the best possible cost per click


If you have a website:
Use google analytics to track incoming and drill down to see what your sell through is.

If you are like me and do not have a web site yet this is applicable: Then we are also trying to figure out return on investment (ROI). ROI will be harder to figure out here because we will not know where our sales are coming from. So it is sorta a guess. If you have been monitoring your daily sales per view and have a baseline on it, even just a sense of it, you can get a subjective feel for if you are getting sales from the adds or not. But you have to give it some time to work for you, because of the 3 impression rule.





Thinking about it
This is early testing, I want to find good sites with fair costs for me. My budget is extremely small to start. I also plan on trying other types of advertising, like Google add words, but this is a good start into the paid add arena. I recommend starting out very slow on paid advertising, test tons, find sites that work for you, and then start promoting what you have shown is working. Remember also that add size and static verses dynamic content plays a role.


Cya
I am still trying to figure out what I want to do today. I finally am caught up on all my outgoing orders. I have ordered my portable display case so I can look professional when I show up at boutiques doors. I want to explore more sites on PW for possible testing. And I have a bunch of new testing I want to do. I need to get some more content out on my blogs and DA need my attention desperately. As well as some friends I have been ignoring need my attention. So many hats.

I can say that I have started to set up yearly goals. I am not big on goals, or used to not be, but in this case yearly goals help me organize my efforts more. This year is the year of the boutique for me. Next year or the year after will be, if ever, craft shows, and boutique buyers conventions. This helps me keep priorities on order.


Welcome to Our Community,cya

Scott

[Pam Hawk]

Thank you, Scott, for writing this. You explained and discussed things I'm still new to, with regards to PW and advertising in general, so not only were you able to put into words some of the details I was aware of, you made some points that I hadn't even learned about yet.