Why I was wondering about YOU…(Adwords users might want to read this)

Thanks for giving me some feedback yesterday about where you all first heard about CartoonSmart. Here’s why I was wondering, and yeah obviously it has to do with $$$…

I pay Google A LOT of money for advertising. I’ve written a couple times before about my love / hate relationship with PPC ads. I love traffic. I hate paying for it. But I also don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it either. Its like a tattoo, its there if I want to look at it, but what’s the point now. I can’t exist without my tattoos and I can’t really pick up new customers without Google. But I can scale back what I pay them, and I’ve been trying to figure out if its worth dropping some of my Content Network ads. If you don’t know….

Paying for Search ads on Google means someone has to search for specific terms I place ads on. Like “Flash tutorials”. Paying for ads on the Content Network is a bit more vague. In Glengarry-Glen Ross terms, the leads are weak. Ideally, the ad should appear on a site that has content related to what I’m advertising about. So someone might write “I need Flash tutorials” on a forum and my ad could show there. They might also write “anyone got a tutorial on installing a new flash for my camera” and its possible my ad would run for that. Which is okay, because I don’t actually pay for impressions (the ad being seen), I pay for the ad being clicked on.

So here’s the question… Why not just buy as many ads as possible? Since I’m only paying for clicks, and I’m assume they are somewhat qualified leads, like the person actually reads the ad and decides “I want to know more!” . Well Google answered this question for me pretty well the other day. My assumptions were probably a bit optimistic.

I started looking in the Network tab ( which I’m pretty sure is a new feature to Adwords ) and I could see some of the sites that were running my Content ads. A lot of non-English sites, a lot of Flash gaming sites geared toward 13 year olds, and some shareware/torrent type sites (great, right). So I was not happy. It was like finding out what was in Google’s secret sauce was poison. I excluded probably 100 sites from running our ads. Basically carpet-bombed a lot of advertising. But on the flip side, some of my campaigns did have a lot of domains listed in the Network tab that I could tell just from name alone, was fine. These were sites I’m familiar with that are definitely Flash or Adobe-heavy community sites.

Anyway, I was afraid I might have bombed some of the ads that brought in YOU. And I guess its possible, because I think I did wipe out about $30 worth of daily traffic, but I’m hoping its just click-crazy kids that were looking for Flash games.

And good news for anyone considering using Adwords, there is a lot more transparency in where your money goes. Its still not perfect, but a lot has been improved since… (runs to check) ….Feb 19, 2002 when I signed up. I bought 2 clicks that day (yesterday was 2,218).

Ear muffs the kids before clicking.

Yay! 47,981rst Place!

Want a link of the top 1,000,000 websites??  I found this off Alexa… top-1m.csv.zip (9MB) . Thats in CSV format, so it should open in any text editor. Most interesting are always the top 200 or so sites, but its also fun to see your traffic neighbors. For example, just 4 places ahead of CartoonSmart.com is ViewSonic.com . Thats a respectable neighbor, not bad right, they make pretty well-known TV’s….  Then again, I only beat out Tarot.de by 5 places. Apparently Tarot cards are pretty damn popular in Germany. =)

Adam has a name problem…

Here’s a great case for why you should blog… After some friendly nudging, I got my friend Adam to finally start blogging. Adam is a painter, and unfortunate enough to have the name “Adam Smith”.  Which is probably a frontrunner for one of the most common first and last name combinations among non-Asians, so googling ”Adam Smith” brings up a lot of famous and not-so-famous people ranked before him.  We toyed with trying to raise his ranking with “Adam J. Smith” and general art terms like “painter, artist, art” , but there’s already an Adam J Smith artist that had some decent art-related rankings. And then a plethora of other Smith artist. 

About 2 weeks ago he finally signed up here on WordPress, and has been killing it with Google since then. I doubt we’ll ever get him a top ten spot for just “Adam Smith” but at the time I’m writing this “Adam Smith painter” ranks his main website, smithmada.com , as the #1 spot, #2 is his myspace profile, and #3 links to his WordPress blog. 

Now obviously just having a blog doesn’t do much rank-wise unless there’s some relevancy to what you’re writing about and there’s a consistent flow of articles on that topic. So he’s been writing about as frequently as he finishes a new piece which is usually every other day. And he’s added some commentary-type articles about painting.  What surprised me is how quick Google picked up on his blog, and his name being relevant to painting.

Now he just needs to keep at it. And on that topic, some of you might know, the WordPress version of my blog is pretty new too so I can’t say I’m a regular blogger yet,  but I’m having an easier time than I thought I would as keeping to it. Part of that has to do with being enthusiastic about blogging now, but also I really like WordPress’s setup for writing. 

Anyway, since I’ve mentioned Adam a ton of times, I should post one of his paintings. Enjoy… 

Swfs are Search Engine Searchable now…

Here’s a few articles on this… Adobe’s Press Release and  Flash Magazine

Long story short though, next time someone says “…but Google can’t spider your Flash files”, they will be wrong. 

If you want to discuss Flash and SEO some more, here’s a CartoonSmart forum on the issue.

Promoting with Google’s Adwords

Recently I was telling someone about advertising my web comic with Adwords, and this is definitely some worthy info for the blog. Here’s a screengrab of how much money was spent last month advertising the comic…

 

Lets look at the most important part first. Cost: $41.61 from 7/1/08 to 7/31/08.  Not bad. Thats the price of two trips to the movies with my wife, or about 3/4 of a tank of gas (ahem, 2008 prices). And for that relatively meager price the site got 4,161 new visitors (presumably new). So exactly a penny per click, which is my top bid setting (so its the most I tell Google I’m willing to pay).

NOW here’s the amazing part. The image ad that appreared for visitors to click on had 1,166,618 impressions ( Impressions =  ad views but not clicks ).  Image ads are important because unlike a text ad that just says something like “Click here for a funny comic strip”, an image ad can have your comic’s logo, your characters, or any other visual of course. So you’re getting some brand recognition even if you aren’t getting a click.  Similar to if I saw a TV ad for a car company, I’m not immediately going to go buy a car, but that car company has once again reminded me that they exist.  So in some ways, I almost don’t even want someone to click. Because remember impressions costs me nothing. Imagine if Volvo worked out a deal with NBC to run commercials where Volvo only had to pay if they sold x number of cars. Crazy, right.  But thats the fun of internet advertising. 

I should mention, some websites that run on Google’s Adsense network don’t allow for Pay-per-click ads. Instead advertisers pay per impressions, so for example 1000 views might cost 25 cents. But as an Adwords advertiser, you won’t be included in with those sites unless you choose to. I’ve only done this with a few sites, (none currently) so my memory is a bit fuzzy on the pricing and how you set that up. I think you just choose the domain, and then you get put in a pool of advertisers getting clocked per impression.  This option is obviously for advertisers that want a bit more bang for their buck, and want their stuff running on more well known sites. Certainly a site like CNN.com won’t be running penny-click ads because they can get much more money for their available ad real-estate. 

And I’m not positive about this, but I think my penny-click ads are usually subject to desperation. Meaning, when all other advertisers have gone over budget for the day (i.e., their ads are done running), and a site is low on ads to show thats when mine are run. When Google is totally out of ads, thats when those public service announcements show up. Like donate to the Red Cross. So yes, before you’re prompted to donate to a life saving organization, a stupid ad for a stupid webcomic gets up in your grill!