Getting an ROI through your PPC campaigns

Jeff from StarProse asks, "I recently started selling ads again on AdBrite after a few years. I’m just wondering, has anything changed in the past few years when it comes to PPC? Also, what is the best way to determine the price to which to sell yours ads?"

Jeff, as I have posted before, I'm not AdBrite's biggest PPC fan.  In fact, I have been an advocate against AdBrite because one a bad experience I had.

In that experience I spent a little more than $100 but had a 0% conversion ratio for a program that had about 8% conversion ratio with other advertising programs.

In total I have bought about 400 clicks from AdBrite over the last year, and I have had one conversion total...One conversion out of 400 clicks regardless of the campaign is pretty bad.

I don't know if the poor conversion ratio is due to click fraud or people clicking links on accident, but either way, AdBrite has left a bad taste in my mouth.

Now, your question is talking about selling advertising on AdBrite, and also asking about PPC.  Lucky for you, I have experience in both.  I also have some experience in setting ad prices.

Here is what I have done when I used AdBrite on a forum I own.  I started the campaign with 0 ads, no network ads or anything.

The reason for this is that people only see a "Your Ad Here" link and there is less to get distracted by.  Also, this forum had some dedicated members that I knew had websites so I thought they might advertise.

Within the first month I had a full roster of ads.  However, I was selling month long ads for $.50 each.  Yes, fifty cents each.  The next month, those ads went up to $3 each and I lost 1 advertiser.  I filled that spot within a week.

The next month I went up to $10 per spot and lost another advertiser but filled it again in about a week.

Keep in mind I still had about 6 advertisers that had been with me for 3 months since the $.50 time.

Eventually my ads were selling for $50 each per month.  I kept 5 of those advertisers for a few months into the $50 per month time but slowly lost some advertisers.

I found that the most people were willing to pay for my forum was about $35 a month.  Since forums are hard to monetize with Adsense and the like, I was pretty happy about making over $200 a month from that forum.

That is how I recommend starting an AdBrite campaign for your site...I really don't like the network ads, but I have heard some people make money from them.  The one thing I do like about them is that they aren't contextual, you will get a series of random ads and one of them might be interesting to all people.

AdBrite and PPC is a unique beast though.  It isn't as good as the Big 3 in terms of conversions but it certainly is less expensive.  And, you can site target much easier than you can with AdWords because all of the sites are listed for you at AdBrite.com.

At this point, the Big 3 keep me pretty busy managing my campaigns but in the future I hope to take a look at AdBrite again, and I would also like to try a few of the second tier networks as well.

Thanks for the question Jeff, not the typical PPC question that involves making money through PPC campaigns but I still liked it!  Free link to StarProse for you!

If you're around Jeff, post a comment and let me know what StarProse is all about.

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