More Web Advertising 101(ish)

This is one of our ads.

In the olden days (that's supposed to make most of us laugh), people used to pay a flat fee to put an ad in a print—not online—newspaper or magazine or on a billboard or other physical location...or on the radio or television. I won't pretend to be an expert about the terms of ad placement in all of these realms, but I recall that a printed newspaper asked for a flat fee for a set amount of space and time, say $500 for an eighth of a page ad in a certain section of the newspaper for one week. On television, the numbers are much bigger, but I think it works much the same way. Maybe someone “in the know” can fill in the facts here with more certainty (send us a comment).

Nowadays, to buy space and time on a web site, you pay per click or impression. A click is when someone actually clicks on your ad to go to whatever your ad links to (for example your website or the iTunes store). This does not mean someone will buy your product. An impression is when your ad appears on a web site that someone is viewing. That's all it is. Every time you see an ad on a web page—whether you click it or not—the advertiser counts this as an impression. An impression does not mean someone will buy your product.

We just finished a whirlwind ad campaign on Facebook. I say “whirlwind” because $50 gave us about five days worth of advertising. Here’s what we got for it: Over 200,000 impressions and 43 clicks. The average cost per click was $1.16. The cost per click depends on your bid and some other factors such as where the ad appeared when it was clicked on—was it showing on good real estate with lots of eyeballs or in a mediocre spot with less visibility. Did I just say “eyeballs”? It’s an advertising thing. I am getting the lingo down, man.

Summary of clicks during our Facebook campaign

For the first few days of our campaign, we had zero impressions or clicks because our bid was way too low. We upped the bid—actually tripled it to match the minimum suggested bid—and it made a big difference.

Does any of this mean we get sales? My unscientific opinion is no. We have not noticed our sales going up at all during this campaign. I imagine we need more clicks, more visibility, longer campaigns, better ads. But, when the app nets us approximately $0.70 for every purchase, how can paying $1 or more per click be worth it even if we do make sales? One click costs us more than we get for selling one copy of the app. If 500 clicks produced one sale, we'd have spent more than $500 to get about $0.70 in sales! So, for our business, this path to creating sales is very limited--at least on the face of it.

Well, just because we have one more free campaign to try, we will begin a Google campaign and see what that brings. Tune in again soon to hear how it goes. And please send out a "please try the SoDunked! app" note to someone today.