How to make Project Wonderful work for you
by Sapphire (September 2, 2008)
I posted a while back that Project Wonderful was pretty cool. I was using it on B2 Bomber, which is notoriously hard to monetize, and it was doing better than most ad networks I’ve tried.
Then B2’s traffic tripled inside a month, and the PW earnings did not. People weren’t bidding each other up, like you’d expect. They were just enjoying the insane amounts of traffic at insanely low prices. And they were pulling ads right and left because they couldn’t afford to pay for the impressions/clicks I was sending them. So I hunted around, couldn’t find anything great, and ended up slapping an AdBrite space in where PW had been. The AdBrite performed really badly - they could only seem to scrounge up one highly irrelevant advertiser for me. So I went back to PW and doubled my minimum bid price.
That’s when people started bidding each other up. A whole different “class” of advertisers who had money to pay for lots of impressions and saw the value of my site.
So, kids, if you have remotely significant traffic, ignore PW’s advice to leave your minimum price at $0 and let the marketplace establish a value through bidding. Minimum prices of $0 attract people who can’t afford to pay more than a few cents. You need to charge what you’re worth in the PW marketplace. To set your price:
- Check your site to see get the number of pageviews PW is recording.
- Go into their market place by clicking “Place a new bid“
- Search for sites like yours. I specified a range of pageviews that would include my site. Then I decided to narrow it further by including tags. That showed me that doubling my price had, coincidentally, been the right move. NOTE: also narrow it down to the size of your banner! I just realized I’m giving away a skyscraper when I could be selling three 125 spots instead, each at the price of the skyscraper.
- Make sure you’ve used every tag, especially the juicy ones, that searchers could possibly apply to your site.
I still have some work to do to figure out how to make PW earn more. If I come up with more tips, I’ll write another post and include a link here.
Posted in Ad Networks
Subscribe to the feed or email updates
September 2nd, 2008 at 4:48 pm
These is a great idea. I dropped PW a while ago because of performance as many people were getting free advertising. I like the idea but wasting all that space for freeloaders just wasn’t cutting it. I’ll test out these changes for a month and see what happens.
September 3rd, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Wow — that was so depressing to see which sites have as many hits as mine — some of the blog authors are barely literate.
September 25th, 2008 at 9:02 am
I don’t have much money when it comes to PPC marketing. I try to go for the lowest bids possible. Sometimes I will pony up the dough and play with the big boys. Thanks for the post.