Posted on February 02, 2008 by Katy

Last week when I redesigned I’m Blogging That I decided that I’d explore the idea of 125 banner ads from Project Wonderful on my site.

Before actually creating banner spots on my blog I really took my time to do research on a little of different advertising websites. I wanted to make sure that I had explored all options before I started testing the waters with any of them.

After much reading, I decided to simply try Project Wonderful first. Notice my word there: try. I’m not setting anything with advertising in stone so I’m trying out different services.

There are things that I like and things that I did not like about Project Wonderful so I thought that I’d itemize my experience for easy comparison if you’re ad shopping.

Auction Style
This is the ‘icing on the cake’ for me to pick Project Wonderful first. The concept of auction style bidding to ad spots on different websites seemed interesting. I didn’t like that the price of your ad spots could be displayed on your site under your available ad boxes but that price was easily removed at ad block setup time.

Minimum Bid
Knowing the value of your website is half the battle. Even though Project Wonderful has an auction style system, you can set a minimum price for your bidders. My minimum bid was $1.00 USD per day.

Follow Option
When setting up ad blocks the option was given to have your banners displayed with or without the no follow tag. I thought this was useful for those that are concerned about the quality of websites they’re linking to and PageRank.

Stat Reporting
Page views and ad block views/clicks are tracked with the Java script code that is placed on your website. Problem is, my site’s page views were grossly under reported. Huge difference between what’s actually happening on my blog and what Project Wonderful reported. The consequence of this is even bigger. If advertisers on Project Wonderful trust the page views that they’re reporting, you’re not going to get the bids on the ad blocks for amounts that actually deserved for the kind of traffic your site has. I’d have to place this as the number one downfall.

No Relevance
I believe that advertisements on your blog should be related to your blog’s niche. This doesn’t mean advertising your biggest competitor. However, the majority of the blogs and advertisers in the system are comic sites. This is something that clearly doesn’t fit with a blog resources blog. Thus, a large amount of the bids for advertising I rejected due to poor fit with my blog’s niche.

Know It All
The final straw for me to pull the ad block from Project Wonderful was a private message by a visitor to my blog. Someone who believed that the stats he viewed for my site were accurate and thus decided to let me know that my minimum bid was entirely too high. “Take or leave my advice but you should lower your minimum bid.” Thanks but no thanks, I know my site’s value and that would be for me to decide, not a visitor from my site to decide.

I was dropping my card and I noticed your PJW ads…

I found that I get more bids if I don’t have a minimum bid. I saw yours were at $1.00 and empty. I’m not sure how long they have been up (few days?), but you may want to try having no minimum and seeing what happens. You may not get $1.00, but you’ll get something. If you were getting thousands of hits a day, a minimum might work, but in the hundreds I don’t think it will, at least not that high.

Just a suggestion, take it or leave it.

Conclusion
If your site doesn’t have a specific niche, I can see Project Wonderful working. It’d also be more helpful if you weren’t as picky as I am about the kind of ads that you want displayed on my site. It’s not just about earning money with my blog, it’s providing value… to my readers and the advertiser. In the end, if I can’t do either (and I can’t with Project Wonderful) it’s time to move on to the next site to test the waters with.

Technorati Tags: Advertising, Blog Advertising, Project Wonderful, Auction Advertising, 125 Advertising