This 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

I was reading this article on Wired about Google’s recent drop in share price which is probably due to new data showing that click-through growth is slowing down for Google’s ads. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there about what this might mean (Google talks about generating less click-throughs due to changes that should hopefully increase the quality of those clicks) but one line in particular jumped out at me.

“It’s not clicks that advertisers are really buying, it’s what those clicks get them, which is sales conversions,” said Sanderson.

This is something that we talk about a lot here. When we decided to go with the CPD (cost-per-day) pricing scheme, our biggest worry was that potential advertisers or publishers wouldn’t get it. CPM and CPC are the default metrics used for measuring ad performance across the industry and a lot of people seem to get kind of obsessed with them. It’s understandable, they are easy metrics to grasp and very easy to measure. The risk is that in focusing on these performance metrics, you can forget that they are really only indirect measures of success.

The only metrics that really matter to an advertiser should be CPS or CPF (cost-per-sale or cost-per-fan). CPC and CPM can help you to begin that analysis (which is why we offer both of these statistics as part of our analysis tools) but unless you complete the loop by analysing how many those displays turn into successful transactions (whatever that means for you), you haven’t really learned all that much.

-Tim

We’ve added a new feature for our advanced members who want to use the same ad on multiple pages with different colour schemes. If you log in to your account and take a look at your ad box code, you’ll notice a few new lines of code and many lines of comments explaining how to use them.

Look for the lines: foregroundColor=''; and backgroundColor='';

If you edit these with the hexadecimal that you want for your foreground and background colours (i.e. backgroundColor='ff0000'; for a bright red), they will override the settings that you set in the ad box properties on our site.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about don’t worry! Cutting and pasting in the code that we generate will still work just fine.

-Tim