Simplicity Rules

Adam DuVander on keeping it simple

MediaBids – an advertising marketplace

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For small publications, finding businesses to advertise can be difficult. And since most small publications are free, advertising is probably the most important aspect of keeping the publication afloat.

Enter MediaBids, which allows publishers to auction or sell advertising space. Also, advertisers themselves can set a price and receive bids in square inches.

I’m not sure whether this is the magic bullet for my wireless publication since I think local ads are pretty important for its success. Currently MediaBids has mostly national advertisers, but the infrastructure for extremely local advertising is in place. In the meantime, MediaBids could help fill in the gaps for fledgling community publications like WifiPDX.

Paying for domain expiration

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While doing some research for WifiPDX, I came across a highly prominent Google Ad for Metromark Corp.

Metromark ad

Click on their ad and you get this:

Expired domain -- oops

To be fair, I have let my own namesake domain expire a couple times. Nevertheless, I would expect a company that requires “$100K min. buy” to put a few of those dollars into their domain registration… especially if they still are paying Google to funnel traffic to their site.

Update: Their site is back up. Woop!

Parental warnings

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The following three things, though I do them, still make me wary thanks to continual parental warnings during my childhood:

  • Eating a lollipop while doing anything other than sitting still.
  • Another choking hazard: eating a spoonful of peanut butter.
  • Licking the top to an opened soup can.

Possibly inspired by the excellent 5ives.

Hipster iPod

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Portland is a hipster sort of town. Because it is all around me, I sometimes have a hard time admitting that I like Miller High Life and ironic mustaches. But then there are moments like this morning…

I shared a bus ride with a young woman in chunky plastic-frame glasses and old school Vans. She was listening to music on a casette tape, not because it’s all she could afford or the only available media, but because she is just that hip. At one point she loudly opened the hatch of her Walkman and flipped the tape over with glee.

As a public service, I provide two additional portable music options for her fellow hipsters. If you would like to listen to MP3s, but not be found out as non-retro, consider hiding your iPod in a Walkman case. On the other hand, if casette tapes aren’t old enough for you, you can always get a portable record player.

Google Ads and Amazon Associates

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I turn 26 this Friday. That is young, but I have roughly the maximum worthwhile experience with the graphical web. The stories I will tell my children involve dialup, abhorrent browser incompatibilities, and, yes, how Google changed the web.

Yet, up until recently, I had never ran a Google Ad campaign. I don’t have anything to sell yet, so I figured it was fruitless to pay for traffic. Then I decided I could learn a lot about how people behave online by sending them to Amazon, where I can essentially sell them anything and collect a small percentage through Amazon Associates.

This all came to me the Thursday before Mothers Day, so I decided to focus my mini campaign ($5 of clicks per day) around a couple items someone might purchase for Mom: chocolates and Oprah’s O Magazine. It turns out the first of these is much, much more popular.

The first day started off well, with commissions barely covering my costs, which I expected. I figured on a ten percent conversion rate and I was on target. The second day I kept the same conversion rate, but lost money. And the final two days were the nail in the coffin, as the graph and table below show.

Cost up, conversion down.

Days in May 6 7 8 9
Impressions 5690 5068 6118 2459
Clicks 27 26 27 8
Avg. Cost .16 .24 .24 .23
Conversion 11% 11% 0% 0%
Commission 4.90 3.98 0.00 0.00
Cost 4.32 6.24 6.48 1.84

Lessons learned

  • The choice of popular keywords like chocolate, godiva, etc. meant I needed to choose something a bit more gourmet than the $10 box of candies. I never did sell the $70 spectacle to which I linked, but folks did settle on ~$30 items.
  • I wasn’t too far off with my conversions the first half of the campaign, but the lower commisions were the culprit. I would have been better off figuring 5% conversion or expecting half the price.
  • Also, I suspect that my 0% conversion on Sunday was due to shoppers being optimistic enough to click, but then realizing that they were really too late with their gift for mom.
  • I might have been better off going for a small-but-sustainable long tail campaign than clamoring about with everyone else trying to capture those last minute shoppers.