advertising for free (and not-free) on permies.com

Are there any advertisers that would be willing to share some of the stats that they got from running an add on permies? Say number of clicks, associated sales, how long their add ran, etc. Having an example might help people who are not familiar with advertising understand why they might want to run an add here. Just a thought!

Daron Williams wrote:Are there any advertisers that would be willing to share some of the stats that they got from running an add on permies? Say number of clicks, associated sales, how long their add ran, etc. Having an example might help people who are not familiar with advertising understand why they might want to run an add here. Just a thought!

I think most of the advertisers, come and advertise, but don't participate in this community outside of their own threads.  

I'll share my stats. This is what I've received so far. My ad was posted on August 29 and it's September 17th today.

#1172 DX5
Stats
Impressions: 22,725
Regular: 8,450    Mobile: 14,275
Clicks / CTR: 732 / 3.221%
Regular 536 / 6.3424% Mobile: 196 / 1.3729%
Unique: 98 Solo: 59

My ad(s) have been seen 22,725 times and clicked 59 times. This traffic matches up to what I'm seeing reported on my Etsy site. My ad runs in 5 states of the USA according to my settings.

According to an explanation that I have received in correspondence with Paul, which I'll likely botch in the paraphrasing, the "Regular" and "Mobile" numbers for Clicks/CTR can be disregarded, more or less. The "Unique" and "Solo" numbers represent something like an upper and lower end of the actual human clicks my ads have received. The discrepancy, per my understanding, is due to factors largely beyond the control of permies.com, and is attributed to scripts run by advertisers that appear to exist in order to inflate the number of clicks any site receives.

Solo = approximate "number of human people who have clicked the link".

Unique represents same group as Solo but allows for some counting of multiple clicks from one person on the same link.

Other advertisers should know that I have received substantive, helpful replies to the few concerns I've shared regarding my ad, which were mostly about my regional settings and stats.


Minor Points:
*   I do notice that each time I have edited my ad, the ad no longer runs until approved by a staff member (which is acceptable practice). After a 3-4 day wait for someone to approve the change, however (including weekend) I do contact permies staff directly with the same request, after which my ad begins running again.  My edited ad is currently in need of approval...!   So maybe I won't edit an ad on Friday if I'm hoping to get clicks on same Friday, unless I hear differently.

*   I just edited my ad to include the lower 48 states, and received an error after submitting the change. My changes didn't save properly.


Lastly, just for comparison, I'd like to mention that clicks on Google's various ad services cost around $0.60 per CLICK, and by comparison I feel I'm getting a better deal and a more targeted audience. Also, I don't know who all these other advertisers are, but I like permies.com and I personally have been hanging around.   :)

Thanks for sharing your experience, Patrick!

Patrick Bales wrote:*   I do notice that each time I have edited my ad, the ad no longer runs until approved by a staff member (which is acceptable practice). After a 3-4 day wait for someone to approve the change, however (including weekend) I do contact permies staff directly with the same request, after which my ad begins running again.

We just made a change to the forum software to make this easier for you and everyone who runs DX5 ads.
From now on, there is no waiting - you can edit your DX5 ads willy-nilly and your edits will happen immediately without a wait.

Google's various ad services cost around $0.60 per CLICK, and by comparison I feel I'm getting a better deal and a more targeted audience

I just wanna run the math a bit to see how we compare.  We sell our stuff by the impression.  So far you have had 22,725 impressions and 59 clicks.   Our prices at the moment for direct DX5 are:

$50 for 50,000 impressions ($1 per thousand)
$100 for 150,000 ($0.67 per thousand)
$250 for 500,000 ($0.50 per thousand)
$500 for 1.5 million ($0.33 per thousand)
$1000 for 5 million ($0.20 per thousand)

So far, it seems like you are getting 2.6 clicks per thousand.  So that would be $0.38 to $0.08 per click.

And for DX5 via thread boost, the prices are:

$0.10 for 1000 impressions ($0.10 per thousand)
$50 for 1 million ($0.05 per thousand)

So that would be $0.038 per click to $0.019 per click.  And there is currently a 40% discount for orders over $1000, which would bring the price down to a penny per click!   Of course, the user goes to a thread instead of directly to your site.  But it does seem that if the user then goes to your site that the conversion would be much higher.

The clicks that we measure are the actual clicks that we record.  For years this was perfectly accurate.  And then about seven years ago the recorded clicks went up, but the number of people that actually arrived at the site stayed the same.   It took us months to figure out what was going on.  

We would record 1000 clicks.  And the client would report getting 100 visits.  

It turns out that there is some sort of twisted .....    program ....   (app, computer, system, bot ....) out there that wants to show that some other site is getting traffic from a reputable site.   And they want to push that information into google analytics.   So they make a browser go to permies and click on an ad.  And then trigger the ad counter stuff and do the redirect to the final destination - only the browser redirects to some other site instead.  So we count the click, but the real advertiser doesn't get the traffic.  The real advertiser gets the traffic for real users, but they don't get the traffic for fake users.

So we added to our algorithms.  

1000 clicks
120 "unique" --  so the 1000 clicks came from 120 unique IP addresses.
100 "solo"  --   about 20 IP addresses had a whole lot of clicks and 100 IP addresses had just one click.  

I am thinking that surely there are a lot more things to add to these lists that are somehow slipping my mind at the moment.   What have I forgotten to mention?

from email ...

1) Are ads still 75% off if linking to a thread it doesn't seem to factor into the calculation when setting up a DX5 ad with the form...

Set up the DX5 via thread boost to get that discount.

also no image upload fields, would I be contacted after an order so staff can review my ads?

Please tell me more about what you have in mind when you say "image upload fields".

2) Banners are 728x90 and squares are 150x150 correct?

Squares, yes.  Banners ... I'll go along with that.

Is this the max since I couldn't find any information on this? (and paul told me earlier that animated .gifs work so that is good to know).

I am willing to talk about bigger stuff.

3) What is a more effective method thread boost/tiny ads & email or the banners & stuff. Any statistics on this?

I think DX5 is probably the most effective.   And next would be similar threads.  No exact numbers.

4) Any other statistics, I like to make data-driven decisions, and literally, any and all additional info helps a ton and I will put it to use.

I guess for the most part I kinda make do with what we have, and I haven't really run the numbers or done any a/b testing.

I want to bump this up with a mention that book and product weeks are a great way to get your product out there and gain some goodwill from the community.

The community here is awesome but responds well to honest, straightforward, this is what I'm selling approach.  We all know that interacting with this world takes some sort of money, and don't begrudge people for earning a living.  

Just a reminder:

I wish to make it clear that I like the idea of promoting lots of things in lots of ways here.

Reminder,  it's okay to promote your stuff,  so long as it is done respectfully. Otherwise,  it could get caught in the spam filter.   The first post in thread has some tips on how to do.

And here's more ways to promote your stuff https://permies.com/advertising/

I use permies a lot to promote my own stuff.  I'm often running experiments to see what things I do give the best results (most links and quality of links - these are not the same thing) for the least time.

Paul says:

Refrain from posting about your product/event/service on other people's threads unless it makes sense.

I see this in reddit and other online moshpits. I see the hate people heap on it when it happens.


It's very easy to want to do this.  Their project is the same topic as my thing to promote.  But do it wrong, and it creates negative associations to the project.  Sometimes it can even earn Googlehate towards the thing we link to.

It's a much better return of energy to promote to a thread that doesn't have the personal investment.  

People are very protective of journal or project threads.   Not just the writer, but the readers.  Their primary reason for reading those threads is the personal connection they feel towards the OP.  So they are going to be hostile if they see promotional material in that thread which isn't about the OP.

To successfully promote in these project/journal threads, extra time needs to be taken.  The item we are promoting needs to answer a specific question already asked in the thread or the person doing the promoting needs to take the time to relate the item to the existing conversation.  

When done well, it can earn some high-quality clicks (but not a large volume).  But it takes an extra half an hour and it's often not the best return on the investment.

There are some good tips here for promoting stuff in general,  not just on permies.

Respectful self promotion is allowed.

However, it's a big help if it doesn't look like spam.  Our readership doesn't respond well to spammy promotions.

What they do respond well to is taking the time to be part of the community and sharing this cool thing you sell.