Are you only playing in one advert? You like your comfort zone don’t you? Big, big mistake. You should never put all your eggs in one basket! The concept of staying with an advert that works is all well and good, but this is making up a very high percentage of your referrals. Why not spread the cheer around. Let’s take a look at the chart below, people like charts.
Source: Google Analytics
Notice a high percentage of referring sites. This web traffic is coming from other advertising web sites such as Entrecard, Social Bookmarks, Project Wonderful, Google, etc. Though the percentage of referring sites is high, I am using 4 different campaigns from different advertising sources.
Social Bookmarks referring web traffic percentage = 35.76%
Entrecard referring web traffic percentage = 26.87%
Direct Traffic = 13.57% (This could be better, but it has improved each week)
StumbleUpon Advertising Budget $4/day = 8.1%
Project Wonderful = 4.8%
Search Engines = .76% (This percentage has doubled in 7 days)
There’s more than 60+ referring sites, but the percentages are not worth mentioning here. You get the point. I have my advertising campaigns spread out using more than one advert. Direct traffic is important as this indicates visitors who are into your niche and return daily to see what new information they can review.
My #1 priority is to increase my Search Engine referral percentage. This will improve my page rank and the value of my web site.
The lesson here is to spread your campaigns all around. It’s important to test as many advertising web sites as possible. I have tested 6 adverts so far and ran each test for 14 days. I am going to share with you my grading and comments for the adverts tested.
Adverts Tested:
Testing based on credit consumption, credit allocation, CTR (Click Through Ratio)
Test time on each advert = 2 weeks or 14 days.
Entrecard: (B) Entrecard has been a reliable source for web traffic (26.87%). The problem with this advert is stability with the web site. They need to improve uptime and prepare for scalability. I am still an active member.
Project Wonderful: (C+) PW has paid me more than Google Adsense in the last 2 weeks. However, I think PW needs to increase their own web traffic outside the Entrecard user base. I am still an active member.
StumbleUpon Advertising: (C) Traffic burst is fast and furious. They need to serve up impressions throughout the day and not in 5 minutes. I am still an active member.
Bidvertiser: (C-) As for a publisher to make money from advertising ads on your site, this advert falls short. I mentioned in another blog that it could be a good service if your looking to advertise your web site. No longer use this service.
Trafficera: (D) Earn time credits by browsing through ads that refresh every 10 seconds. By far one of the worst. I have better things to do with my time than sit and earn credits based on time. No longer use this service.
TrafficSwarm: (F) Another time consuming effort to gain credits, but what’s worse is credit allocation. It takes forever for your credits to be used to advertise your site. In fact, out of 450+ credits I earned, the credit allocation has taken more than 4 days. No longer use this service.
