Comparison of Google Adwords to Project Wonderful
I was surfing a small website when I noticed an ad that had the subtitle, “your ad here for $0.10 per day”. My thoughts were that even at 10 cents, the price was high for a low volume site, but I clicked the link. I expected a web page where I would have to email the webmaster my design and then send money using PayPal, but what I found was the Project Wonderful website (bad name, by the way, but it adds to the feeling that this is a local boy made good).
Project wonderful is a full-fledged and feature rich website. As a programmer, I could see the hand of a single architect at work, and there were many things that I would like to change, but they were all small matters of style, and nothing of substance. I am assuming that this is the brainchild of someone like me – a programmer with lots of coding experience and a smattering of style experience.
I like the place – it felt like I was walking through a familiar neighborhood.
The premise of Project is that you put ad space on your site, and people bid to fill the ad space. There seem to be fewer advertisers than publishers so most of the time my ad space just displays the default “your ad here” image.
If you have a website you can have ads on your page and people bid on the space. The high bidder gets the space. If only one person bids, he gets the space free! You make no money, but you are building up a clientele, anyway.
I have decided that the majority of the advertisers will sometimes pay for the high volume sites, but most will pick sites with no bids and lowball them. In the three days that I’ve had the project wonderful ads on the blog (very low volume) I made no money. There appears to be a strategy by some advertisers to have zero dollar bids on lots of low volume sites to get their ads out when the small guys get no bids. I would guess that the small sites would rather have an add on the site rather than the depressing default graphic.
I have decided that Project Wonderful is only good for ad revenue in higher volume sites with several thousand page views per day. I am considering it for my HarpTab site that gets about 5,000 page views a day. I think I could be making $50 a month from the hits.
Using Project Wonderful to by ad space is another matter. I have used Adwords on some of my sites to promote them, especially around the holidays. I put up a text ad on Project Wonderful with similar wording to one that I use on Adwords. I’ve been running both Adwords and Project Wonderful ads to see who wins.
Adwords – One day totals: about 35,000 displays, 43 clicks, cost $3.34. Cost per click is $0.08.
Project Wonderful – three day totals: 17,000 displays, 3 clicks, cost $0.26, Cost per click $0.09.
The difference in display totals is my own fault. I bid on five medium sized websites that I thought might reach people who might like to name stars. Google Adwords picks based on the keywords that I chose, so they can match better than I can. If I had bid on more ads I might have had more displays. I could have bid on lots of little sites and blogs and paid zero of a penny for a day’s displays and perhaps done better on the clicks.
One thing is that Project Wonderful has a much lower click-through-rate (CTR). Adwords had 0.11% CTR where Project Wonderful had 0.02% CTR. This is a large difference. Looking at the websites with the Project Wonderful ads, I did see that they were cluttered with ads, lots of the ads were splashy animated Gifs and the many ads were “below the fold” near the bottom of the page. My little text ads were lost in the overwhelming ad-blindness that the clutter caused.
Is Project Wonderful worth it? This would depend on the circumstances. If you have a site that gets over 1,000 hits a day, I would guess that you could make a $1 to $10 a month per thousand hits. This is in line with some other forms of ads with which I have experimented. Kontera and Chitika pay much less. I know that controlling the nature of ads is a big deal to webmasters concerned with integrity of a blog. A blog is a personal thing and you don’t want sleazy ads on your site. Project Wonderful lets you choose who gets to advertise on your site. You get to preview the ads before they appear.
If you are an advertiser, there are opportunities to get very cheap advertising on a great variety of low volume sites. It is quite likely that you can find a site that caters to your site’s demographics and an ad could do quite a bit of good. I would check each site, though, to make sure that your ad will appear prominently on the page and is not surrounded by sleazy “dancing boloney” ads.
Project Wonderful has excellent opportunities for the advertiser and publisher, but it requires work and research to make it pay. In general, Google is better than Project Wonderful but fine-tuning your campaigns can make up for this.
I’m actually getting really good results with project wonderful. I tried many sites for 1000 and looked at different variables. Atm I’m getting 1-2 percent click through rate overall 3-4 percent unique viewer ctr .01-.02 cost per click. Less than 2.00 spent and I’ve gotten nearly 100 clicks!
However, i’ve also not gotten any conversions. I’m going to wait till about 10.00 (profit I make from a sale) if I still haven’t sold anything ill pull the plug.
I use Project Wonderful on my site to host ads to gain a (little bit) of income – so I am a publisher.
My experience is that you aren’t going to make an awful lot of money as a publisher because most of the advertisers who use PW are small and don’t have the money top spend. Or, are just after advertising for free. But why should they? Set a minimum ad price even if it’s very low.
Additionally I’ve found that despite PW vetting potential publisher sites (like mine) for quality of design etc – they don’t seem to vet advertisers’ ads or sites in the same way (?).
So as far as ads that get placed on your site – expect either kitsch, or just poorly-designed ads, that in a lot of cases link to similarly poorly-designed websites. This to the detriment of both the look and reputation of your own site.
That said – unlike other advertising models, the bidding is fun and at least you will get some kind of income, if only a small one.
I took a look at the Project Wonderful website and it seems very user friendly and easy to understand. My problem with Google Adwords is that I’ve never quite understood all the intricacies and so have been uncomfortable setting up and then using my account.
Honestly, many of the small business owners (like myself) are not internet savvy and don’t understand this stuff. Make the program easy & fast and I bet more people would choose it.
You can set a minimum bid for your ad space.
Instead of the default ‘Your Ad Here’ banners you can do it smarter this way: Upload a banner of an affiliate program you join and link with your affiliate link to it. This in return will justify your minimum bid as the bidders on Project Wonderful now have to compete with one of your dollar earners outside of the network.
This is what I do and it works.