I’d bought some Entrecard ads on other sites recently, but didn’t get many clicks from them. I sat down and worked out what the reasons could have been and came up with a few ideas. Here are a list of factors that you should consider, to help reduce the cost-per-click and increase how successful your campaign is:
- Position on the screen - If their website has the widget “below the fold” (meaning a user has to scroll down to see it), then your advert is less likely to be seen. Try and advertise on those sites where the widget is close to the top, usually top left or top right.
- Speed of the site - Some users are only there to drop cards, and will only re-visit sites they know are fast loading, at least for the EC widget part. If you can find out which of the sites are fast loading, and get an advert on there, then your advert will be seen by many more people.
- Neighbouring Elements - Even if the widget is situated near the top of a fast loading page, if it’s surrounded by other adverts, or is hard to distinguish from other attention-grabbing elements on the site, then your advert is less likely to be noticed. Pick a site to advertise on where the EC is their main (only?) form of advertising, so that your advert will stand out more.
- Popularity of the site - This can be tricky to measure. On EC itself, the popularity for a site is defined by how many drops the site received the previous day. Great, you think, lets advertise on the one with the highest number of drops! Be aware however that drops can only be done by other EC users; a non-IT-related non-blogging site with a low EC popularity, may actually have considerably more visitors to their site than a blogging site - it’s just that the latter has a higher percentage of visitors from the EC community. Of course, if your own site is about EC, then the above reasoning is annulled.
- Cost of the advert - A more expensive may lead to a few more clicks, but the real value is in the cost-per-click table you can find on the Statistics page of your EC account. I’ve yet to establish with buying lots of cheap adverts that may get a couple of clicks each is better value for credit than splashing out on a more expensive advert to get a whole load of clicks. Either way, just remember that a more expensive advert only means it already has more adverts lined up. You may do well to watch the cost of an advert on your chosen site over the course of a week or two, to see what the high and low values of it are, then buy an advert when it hits a low again.
- Cost per popularity - One of the things I started checking was that you can high EC popularity sites, with low advert costs. Taking the above points into account, this means you can find a site that has lots of droppers, but won’t cost a lot for you to advertise on. I took a very rough ratio of 4:1 - if the popularity of the site was over 4 times the cost of the advert, then this was definitely worth looking into. Of course, if other factors make the site suitable to place an advert there, then a smaller ratio would be fine. You can find these good deals by searching for cheapest, setting your maximum, then ordering by most popular first.
- Your advert - Quite simply, if your advert looks interesting, and catches the attention of the reader, then they are more likely to click on it. Lets just say that an image of an attractive looking female will probably grab the attention of the majority of male readers.
- Topic of the site - Advertising your gardening blog on a site about computer games probably isn’t going to be targeting your potential readers very well. Some people prefer to advertise on a variety of sites, whilst others prefer to only target comparable sites within their own topic. Remember that advertising on a site that is about Entrecard itself, is one way of targeting other EC users.
I really hate when users put their widget down the bottom. It not only rips off advertisers, but also it makes it a pain in the arse to drop them!
It’s why I decided to move mine up right to the top just over a week ago - then, even if my visitors are all just droppers, at least they might include me in their daily 300 if the site is fast and the widget is easy to see immediately. There’s then a chance that a post title might intrigue some of them to actually read something whilst they’re here!
It’s also important how active the site/ blog is itself. Mine has ups and downs as I am not obsessive about clicking EC widgets every day. I get traffic from other things I am doing. But, I find it really time consuming to do things to promote the blog. Leaves me little energy and passion for updating the blog itself.
@Aimey - It doesn’t rip off advertisers. When you choose a blog to buy ad space on you should be checking where the widget is placed. If it is low just don’t buy the ad. Buyer beware.
I only feel bad about those who have an ad on mine when I get an impulse to change the template and I don’t have an ad (or any widgets) up for awhile.
@Laura: How active the site is, is of course another good factor, and one that I forgot, even though when checking sites, I tend not to advertise on sites that has a last post over a week ago (not that I necessarily update my blog more frequently than that sometimes!).
The other indicator of how active the site is, is the number of comments on the most recent posts - sure, the most recent post might be too recent to have received any yet, but post 2-5 should have some - if it hasn’t then it gives the impression that not many people are sticking around to add something of their own.