Project Wonderful: Tips to Get the Most Out of the Virtual Advertising Auction

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Be a Smart Bidder on Project Wonderful

In the past, I’ve used a number of advertising methods in the past to get the word out about my webcomic Wayrift. I spent more money than I would have liked with less results and very little control and information on where my banner was being placed, how often it was shown, and how many people were really being reached through my ad. But all of that changed when I found Project Wonderful.

Project Wonderful (PW) is not just your normal advertising system, but a virtual auction house for advertising spots on other sites. You can join for free, create your ad banners (they give you size templates to help you out), and then browse the list of sites that are offering advertisements based on a number of criteria you choose. Once you’ve found a site you want to put your banner on, you simply place your bid and wait to see if you’re the highest bidder.

You choose where your banner spot will be. You choose how much you want to bid and for how long. You can change the price of your bid at any time. You can cancel your bid at any time for any reason. You get in detailed stats and reports on how many times your ad has been viewed vs. how many times it has been clicked. You get stats on how much it cost you per click and per view to keep your ad running.

All in all, it’s a very good system that has brought my sites a lot of results. Having been a member of Project Wonderful for a few months, I’ve decided to compile a list of tips to anyone who wants to optimize their advertising in the system. Just like anything else, PW has an economy of supply and demand because every spot is always up for grabs… it just depends on how much in demand it is. Interested in my theories and experiences…? Read on!

Tip 1: You get what you pay for.

Sure, that ad spot might cost you $0.05 a day. That seems like a real deal, doesn’t it? Not if you’re not getting any views or clicks.

An ad is only worth the amount of traffic it brings to your site. And like it or not, I’ve discovered placing ads that generate traffic requires putting some cash into the PW bank. That doesn’t mean that you have to spend $30 a day on top-ranked sites to display your banner — I’ve found that plenty of sites out there between $1-$3 a day that are a great starting place to advertise while you’re building up profit from your own banners (but that’s a different topic all together).

The idea is to get a cycle of traffic going. You place bids that build traffic. The traffic comes to your site that, in turn, makes the banners on your site more valuable through views and clicks. Eventually, you will get advertising that pays for itself, or even make a small profit. But to do that, you have to be willing to put in a little money to start it off.

Tip 2: Focus your banner placement.

So it’s a great idea to put out a whole bunch of different banners on lower costing sites… that means more different people will see it and that will result in a variety of traffic. Right?

That’s what I thought at first. But over time, I found this really wasn’t the case.

The best thing I’ve found to do is really sit down and spend some time with Project Wonderful’s search engine. Search for key words that you would use to describe your own site, and be as specific as you can. Find other sites that get a fair amount of hits per day that are related in some way to your own. Think in terms of who you want to your banner speak to. It’s far more likely that you’ll get traffic if you place your ad on a site that would appeal to the same sort of audience as your own.

For example, I focus on advertising my fantasy webcomic, Wayrift, on other comic sites. To be even more detailed, I tend to keep it within the fantasy genre if I can. It doesn’t always have to be another manga-styled comic to get results, I’ve found. But people who are visiting a fantasy comic are more likely to be interested in trying out another new fantasy comic and click the link.

Tip 3: Study your advertising space before you bid.

Would you spend a lot of money developing a roadside bill board only to have it put up in a place that is blocked by trees? Probably not. So why would you pay to put advertising on a site that doesn’t put your banner where other people can really see it? To me, a site that places their PW banner off to the side at the bottom of the page somewhere really isn’t interested in helping advertise someone else. It’s just another revenue box for them.

Bid smart! When you find a site that might be a good choice to advertise on by theme, spend some time looking at where their ad boxes are located. Visit the site through the eyes of a causal surfer… would your ad be in a position that someone stumbling through would see it? Or does it take a lot of scrolling to get to it?

Sometimes you will see a site that has a number of skyscraper ads down the side and you may notice that they tend to go down in price the further down the page you get. There’s a reason why the ad at the top is selling for $3 and the one at the bottom is only $0.90. Visibility. It doesn’t matter how many hits that site gets a day… if your ad isn’t going to be placed in a position where nearly everyone that visits can see your ad at some point, then that hit didn’t even count for you.

Tip 4: Use the built-in stats to optimize your spending.

This is so simple to do. Once you’ve chosen a few websites that have a good theme and good ad positions, test them out for a while. Put your bid in and see what results you get from their site. Keep an eye on the stats generated by your banner. If you don’t like what you see for the money you’re paying, by all means, drop the bid and find somewhere else to advertise. You may just not have found a site that speaks to the same sort of visitors that would be interested in your own site.

To the left is an example of some of the statistics you will see on your PW account. I tend to pay most attention to the Cost Per Click (CPC)… because this is what translates to me to be the results. It’s fine that my banner had over 20,587 views (and remember that views means repeated views from visitors… and for comic sites, that tends to be a lot as people go from page to page to page). But to me, I want to know my money is going as far as it can for what I’m paying.

CPC tells me here that for every penny I put, I’m getting one click. Would you pay someone a penny to click on your site? Maybe… But would you pay them a nickle? A dime? A quarter? Just to view your site and not really know if they will ever return or if they even took any time to see what was there? That’s a different story, eh? So why would you want to advertise anywhere that has a high CPC?

I tend to look for sites that give me a $0.01 CPC… I might tolerate $0.02 if I know that site is going through a slump time in traffic. But anything above that, I look to see if they have specific update days that would be better to try back with them again (see below).

Tip 5: Understand the rise and fall of traffic.

Know that sites go through traffic slumps — learn to identify their peaks. In the case of Wayrift, advertising on other comic sites means that I learn their update schedules. If a comic updates every Monday, then that would be a good day of the week to put my banner there because they will naturally be getting more traffic based on their update. So for that one day, I’ll place my ad on that page and for the rest of the week, I might advertise other places (unless that one site is just that good that it keeps the traffic coming!). Don’t abandon a potential site just because you tested it one day and it didn’t get results… it could have just been a down time in the network for them.

Tip 6: Design a good, eye-catching banner.

This should go without saying. But if you’ve picked a focused, themed site that gets a good number of hits per day and the ad banner is good and visible… but you still have a high CPC… you might want to redesign your banner. You may want to think of ways to catch people’s attention. Look at the sites that you’re advertising on and design around that. If you advertise on darker sites, maybe make a banner lighter in color that would stand out. Spend some time with a catchy phrase, logo or something that would make a viewer stop to think. All this is left up to marketing and advertising… so what works for one won’t always work for another.

Also, note that if you advertise on the same sites often, they may get used to seeing your banner there an start to ignore it… even if it is a good banner. So it’s a good idea to change it up from time to time. If you find something you think is working, keep the part of your banner you know that’s good and tweak other elements.

My first Wayrift banner seemed to work well. I liked the catch phrases and the lead up. And the art was bright and attention getting. But after a while, I found that there was a slump in clicks. So I decided to try something new. I changed the picture and kept the wording… and I found that my response rebounded again, better than the first time, even on sites I had advertised on in the past before. What a difference a good banner really can make!

Those are some of my tips for anyone who is currently using Project Wonderful or thinking about trying it out to advertise their site. It has certainly been one of the most rewarding systems for me — what started as just a way to increase traffic to my site actually ended in earning an unexpected bit of a profit (though most of that goes right back into the price of advertising!).

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Posted by User Image Aywren