Scooping up the advertising deals
March 31, 2008 12:36 pm pw advancedThis tip is aimed primarily at our advertisers. Short version: by leaving standing bids on sites at below the market rate, you can get exposure on sites that you might not normally be able (or willing) to pay for.
One of the tenets of the Efficient Market Hypothesis is that the current prices of goods in a marketplace already reflects all of the information about their value. In other words, unless you know something no one else knows, you can’t consistently outperform the market.
At this stage in our lifecycle, the prices on Project Wonderful are probably not perfectly efficient, meaning that there are plenty of opportunities for eagle-eyed advertisers to get higher than average value for their advertising. Hindsight being 20/20 you can see this in our market information by comparing the movement of prices to the traffic that a site gets. A lot of our publishers are comics artists who publish 3-5 times a week. When you look at their traffic you can see the clear pattern as traffic grows on weekdays and drops on weekends. Often the prices do not match that same pattern, which is odd. If one of six buttons on a site with 50,000 visitors is worth, say $1.50 on one day, you’d expect that button to be worth the same amount on any other day with similar traffic.
Below is a portion of a sample chart from one of our members. I’ve superimposed the traffic stats with the movement of prices. You can see that generally speaking they move up and down in relation to one another, but that from time to time, they diverge. Pay particular attention to the area I highlighted in blue. People advertising on the 21st were paying just over half what you’d expect to pay on a weekday.
Why is this happening? There could be a number of reasons but one of them I suspect is that people aren’t making use of the features we provide to help you catch these moments. For the enterprising advertiser looking to capitalize on opportunities like this, we offer two approaches.
First, you can use the notification system and set up a search that will notify you when an ad box falls into your price range. For example, ads on the blog are going for $0.04 right now. If you ran a search for “sites with a URL like: blogjectwonderful.com” and then set the bid price at $0.01 then you’d get no results returned. But setting up a notification for that search would mean that the system would contact you if the price ever fell. Then you can log in and bid away.
For an even more automated strategy, consider leaving a standing bid on pages that you’d love to sneak on to from time to time. What this means is putting up a bid far below market price which you suspect the box might fall to from time to time. Then set it for some longer period of time (say a month) and let it go. Whenever the price dips, the system will start bidding for you and displaying your ad. When prices climb again, you’re no longer charged. In this way, you can take advantages of gaps in the marketplace where prices don’t match the full value of exposure on the site.
Happy bidding!
-Tim
April 3rd, 2008 at 5:13 am
Excellent article, and let’s not forget the benefit of bid-seniority: if you match other advertisers’ bids but yours is older you stand to save $0.10
April 3rd, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Good advice, I was looking for the note that Bad Karma wrote too, because I’ve noticed that too…
I just wrote a tip for publishers on Project Wonderful to monetize their site, which will also help publishers get more page views too. Hey, the publishers could use some tips too!
April 4th, 2008 at 11:04 am
David, how well has that been working for you? It seems like if the ad is only up some of the time that advertisers will see rather low numbers of hits.
April 7th, 2008 at 2:58 am
This is a good tip, I’ve been doing that for some months now. I currently have three bids that have been up for six months, and I don’t plan to stop them anytime soon.
As Bad Karma noted, another advantage is that as a long-term bidder, you have a lead on others. One of the ad boxes I bid on has 8 ads, and most of the time advertisers bid $0.02 for a place in that ad box. I bid $0.01 and have been doing so for 6 months, so when at a certain moment only 7 people bid $0.02, I’m the first one to have my ad displayed on that site, for half the price of the others.
April 8th, 2008 at 6:37 am
That’s some good tippage there…
The only caveat is that you check your funds regularly, especially if you run close to the limit as a sudden switch of all those ads can drain funds quicker than expected… so make sure you have plenty in reserve to make the most of this tactic.
April 10th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
I like these advertising strategies, especially the one that you place a lower than market bid for 1 month.
April 11th, 2008 at 7:32 am
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April 18th, 2008 at 9:07 am
Definitely solid material here. I’ve tried this idea briefly in the past, and it seems promising.
It’s been a while since a new blog entry has been posted here.. looking forward to more soon (hopefully).
April 22nd, 2008 at 12:28 am
And it does help advertisers also…
May 12th, 2008 at 8:24 am
Good info. I think PF lacks quality advertisers which can keep some publishers away from this. If you people can work more marketing PF then this can one of the best in industry. ANH, i like PF verymuch.
June 19th, 2008 at 3:12 am
Interesting, the advertising methods on PW are more sophisticated than I realized.
September 4th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
Very cool. I plan to put this into action just as soon as I can make a deposit!!!
October 12th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Great features I will have to start using! Thanks for the tips!
November 10th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Hi,
I’m still advertising with the same publishers. My ads automaticaly show when I’m the highest bidder. This way I don’t have to worry about it.
Best regards,
José
February 17th, 2009 at 7:16 am
its a big help after reading this post as even after quiet sometime me become a publisher still needs to digg more about this.
Thanks heap
July 2nd, 2009 at 11:09 am
This works especially well if you are on a budget and don’t want to overpay for a site. If you have a measured click through ratio and conversion rate then you will begin to know what you can afford to spend on a site. This method keeps you within your spending targets while at the same time letting you benefit the minute your opportunity is in your price range.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that some sites, even though they have consistent traffic flow, will get higher bids during certain times. I am willing to let those bids win because it is the same traffic to me and converts at about the same rate so there is no point in getting into a bidding war.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that if my ad does run for a while and then disappears at a site the click through rate is often higher when it reappears. I think this is because there are many people who have noticed the ad but didn’t click. Then the ad goes away and they suffer regret. When the ad comes back they jump on it right away for fear of losing it again. Folks might want to experiment and measure that ‘teaser’ effect on your advertising. Not only should it save you money but it should increase your click through rate