There's no doubt by now that for the webcomics industry, Project Wonderful beats the Google competitor hands down. But it still lacks a few things that Google can offer - things that, if they were implemented, could persuade more advertisers to sign up.
While it's nice to have other webcomics advertised on your site and it's wonderful to be part of such an indie community, I think it'd be great if we could get some big businesses to invest some of their mammoth advertising budget into our system.
So, how do we persuade them to come and give us their money? Hit "Read More" for some of my thoughts, and don't be shy to comment with your own.
The typical business owner has a different set of needs than the average Project Wonderful advertiser. A good nine out of ten advertisers right now are other webcomic and blog sites, whose return on investment can be counted simply by how much traffic they're getting for their money - a Google AdWords advertiser wants to know exactly how much money they're making in terms of hard currency. They want to have a little line of code on their "Thank you for buying" page that sends a ping back to the advertising website, so that said ad site can say "This customer came from x.com, along with y other customers, and you're paying an average of £z per new customer. This many customers left your site at the first page, this many got halfway through and then your shopping cart confused them and they buggered off to boingboing.net, and this many got all the way up to entering their card details and then sobered up and decided against it. Oh, and by the way, Thursdays seem to be your best day." They want graphs, and charts, and monthly performance reviews - in short, the sort of stuff that most of us aren't interested in at all, but that marketing executives tend to drool over. Oh, and they want to export the whole lot to .csv so they can screw around with it in their custom-built spreadsheets.
So, we should probably talk about inbuilt statistic tracking.
The typical AdWords customer also wants to know exactly how much they're spending in a day - which, disappointingly, is something that we don't have right now. Sure, we can go through page after page of bids and add them all up, but we shouldn't have to - likewise with how much we're receiving.
So, we could do with a simple "This much coming in, this much going out" box on the "Your Money" page.
One more thing - although we're a valuable and hard-to-target demographic, business owners don't want to advertise exclusively on blogs and webcomic sites. It's great that we've got such a non-corporate network going here, but I can't help but feel that a few tutorial sites or informational/instructional blogs would encourage (and make lots of money from) big-budget businesses.
And on the other side of the coin, what do we have that Google AdWords doesn't?
LOADS of stuff!
For one thing, Project Wonderful has a far more open and transparent setup than Google AdWords. There's no such thing as click fraud, and if a business makes a bad choice and blows a load of cash for a very poor R.O.I, then it has nobody to blame but itself.
Secondly, advertisers have far more control over where their adverts appear - and can consequently target their markets with far greater resolution using Project Wonderful.
Third, how many webcomics have dropped AdSense in favour of Project Wonderful? AdSense isn't much good for webcomics because it relies heavily on text to serve relevant ads. The webcomic-visiting demographic (IE us lot) is a valuable resource with disposable income, time and attention that, until now, has been hard to tap - and damn near impossible to target directly. For an advertiser trying to appeal to this audience, Project Wonderful is pretty much the only game in town.
Fourth, free advertising! Kind of a no-brainer.
What do you think would help make Project Wonderful an AdWords-killer? Comments are enabled.
Project Wonderful Talk
http://www.projectwonderfultalk.com/article.php/competing_with_adwords