Online Ads

I've never really done much with online advertising, as it has never appeared worth the money sunk into it. But, this month, I'm testing two different venues.

First, I'm trying a "long tail" version of Google Ads. I've got about two dozen very basic book title ads that direct to the book detail pages. They are running primarily on the content networks, at a fairly low cpc (usually $.10-.20). The ads are not optimized for click-thru, as I really don't want everybody and their mother clicking on them; I'm just looking for serious clicks. I've been getting 50,000-60,000 impressions a day at my current per diem budget, with a very low ctr that still usually manages to reach the daily budget. I get very few impressions on the Google search -- not happy about that, but Google has a money-grubbing scheme that apparently doesn't allow search impressions from low bids, even when there are no other impressions showing up on search.

My second venue is Project Wonderful, which has an interesting advertising methodology, but appears to be focused mostly on a community of webcomics and the like. Right now, I'm bidding one book ad (skyscraper for Historical Bigfoot) on a single webcomic, Real Life.

I won't know if there's any positive outcome from these until end of month, to see if there has been any spike in sales numbers. Of course, I readily admit that my book title detail pages are not optimized for best click-thru's to Amazon. But, it's an interesting experiment.