Buying Advertising

After setting up a Project Wonderful account and either making a deposit or earning some money, you’ll probably want to start placing bids on other websites. Here are a few guidelines to help you out.

There are a lot of sites in the Project Wonderful system that get fewer than a hundred unique visitors a day, but have correspondingly low costs to the advertiser. The higher-traffic websites attract far more interest from advertisers, and thus have disproportionately high bids. Placing many small bids on low-traffic websites will ultimately provide far better value for money than placing a few large bids on high-traffic websites. It is up to you to decide whether the money you’ll save warrants the significant amounts of extra time involved in placing those bids.

Some advertisers choose to block animated ads automatically, so it’s important that you provide a static alternative in order to maximise your potential market.

Viewers who have JavaScript turned off will not see animation; the first frame of the animation appears as a static ad to such users. So don’t design an animation that starts with a blank frame - non-JavaScript users will only see the blank frame.

While the 117*30px button ad is the most popular format, it makes sense to have banners, halfbanners, squares, leaderboards and skyscraper adverts prepared so that you can catch the bargains going on the lesser-used formats.

Getting a good idea of how well your ad will perform takes time and money. One good way of optimising your ads is to place a batch instructed to run for a year, and then revisit them one month later to check up on them. In Project Wonderful’s Bid Performance page, you can see the Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM) data for each advert, and cancel bids that fall outside of your expectations.

Don’t go crazy making hundreds and hundreds of zero-dollar bids that you’ll have to place again in two days’ time. A one-cent bid will in theory cost you a maximum of $3.65 for a whole year of exposure, no maintenance required - in practice it’ll cost far less than that, as all the slots have to be filled up and at least one more bid placed before it starts costing you money.

If you’ve found a good deal, don’t hesitate to sign up for an account and tell us about it! We’re all here to help each other out.