This is more of a gentle reminder for those of you spending money promoting your site, services, affiliate products, etc. I recently started working on doing more media buys. Simply put, media buying is buying primarily banner ads on sites of all sizes and popularity. Everything from small ma and pa sites to Top 500 sites like ESPN.com, NYTimes.com, etc.
I’ve been more dabbling and working on learning about it, so I haven’t made any huge buys yet. I did, however, decide to try some banners on Adbrite’s network. Adbrite is known for having a HUGE amount of traffic, but not necessarily for it being quality traffic.
I signed up, plugged in my credit card info, loaded up my first campaign and set it off and running. I set what I thought was a pretty conservative budget at $200 a day. Keep in mind, I usually set my Google Adwords campaign daily budgets at a minimum of $500 a day, oftentimes upwards of $1000. On Facebook, I think my daily cap is set to something like $5000 right now. So $200 is pretty small.
The problem wasn’t the daily budget, but two other things that happened. First, since I hadn’t used Adbrite before, I grossly underestimated their ability to get ad impressions for me despite being pretty selective about the categories I wanted them shown in. In 5 days time, I had over 2 million impressions! Dang!
Second, I got busy with some other tasks and didn’t check back on the Adbrite campaign for 5 days. Yep…5 stinkin days. Like an idiot, I let an unoptimized campaign run for way too long while they blasted through my budget with crap impressions. I was a bit surprised when I logged in and found almost $1100 had been spent in 5 days with a VERY low CTR (click thru rate).
It seems I’ve learned yet another lesson for all of us (at least I hope)…and it’s a simple one. When dealing with new sources of traffic, set your limits low and check back OFTEN. I basically wasted $1100 because I got busy. That’s a stupid rookie mistake.
Hopefully this doesn’t cause anyone to shy away from trying something new. That’s not the point. There are tons of untapped opportunities out there, and we all need to be looking for them so we can continue to grow. Just control things tightly when you’re starting with something new. Don’t assume it’s going to be like Google Adwords or some other traffic source that you’re used to.
You can thank me later for saving YOU a thousand bucks!
April 30th, 2010 at 2:02 am
Thank you Ryan, for sharing your honest experience and trial on shoemoney write up.
April 30th, 2010 at 3:03 am
Sounds like adbrite is a rip off if you put 200.00 in and thats all you got. Whay didnt you opt to have the campaign end at 200.00 and not have it continue to roll on?
April 30th, 2010 at 3:24 pm
Actually not a ripoff at all. Just need to treat new traffic sources individually. I approached it like I have Facebook, Adwords, Bing, Yahoo, etc. Traffic usually ramps up pretty slowly on those types of networks.
April 30th, 2010 at 3:26 pm
The point is not to get you to avoid Adbrite. There are PLENTY of people killing it on Adbrite. I will be one of those soon because I'm putting in the time to figure out their traffic and optimize. The point of the post was a reminder to pay attention when you're trying a new traffic source. Control the factors so you minimize your loss while you figure things out.
May 3rd, 2010 at 8:48 am
This is good. Thanks for sharing your experience otherwise we will not even know where the money goes.
May 3rd, 2010 at 8:51 am
Maybe it is good to explore some other "free" methods of advertising, such Yahoo! answers, blogging, etc.
May 5th, 2010 at 7:23 am
Thanks for sharing such a nice post.
May 9th, 2010 at 4:34 am
thanks for sharing your experience, its good to know those little details, the devil is in the details, right? and little thing like that can cost a lot of cash, but it unavoidable, at some point everyone makes mistakes
May 9th, 2010 at 6:08 pm
Wow that is really shocking to me that, that many impressions racked up so quickly, Always makes me wonder about the reliability of it lol. Still though sometimes we must learn lessons the hard way, it will only make us stronger in the long run!
May 11th, 2010 at 3:42 am
Yeah.. I do know lot of marketers who are doing really good with Ad brite.. though you can not compare it with Google or Bing.. mainly because adbrite's content network is almost unregulated.. but if you manage it well.. you do end up with some quality..
May 13th, 2010 at 7:46 am
The most actual problem for me is to calculate the profit which it is possible to rerceive with the help of various advertizing measurements. In most cases such profit doesn't cover the costs for advertizement.
August 18th, 2010 at 12:53 am
Nowadays i think such ad campaigns work really more to give the particular amount of money. I think there is no need to calculare as there is no big amount from it can be earned, but simply if your ad campaigns are really good then they need some calculations.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:00 am
I just came across this article. I had the free $100.00 form Adwords which I haven't used yet. I have so little money I'm scared to try this. Your article does give me a lot of food for thought. Thanks