{"id":1131,"date":"2012-06-24T22:59:02","date_gmt":"2012-06-25T03:59:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=1131"},"modified":"2012-06-24T23:19:20","modified_gmt":"2012-06-25T04:19:20","slug":"effectiveness-of-ads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=1131","title":{"rendered":"Effectiveness of Ads"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve always been a little dubious about the effectiveness of advertising: even as a kid without leaving the house, I’d be exposed to hundreds of ads a day just by watching TV. Sure, advertising is needed in some cases, particularly for new products (how else would I have become hooked on Special K cracker chips, or know what’s coming soon to a theatre near me?). But the amount of spending on advertising is something I’ve had trouble wrapping my head around: so very much<\/em> is ad-supported, especially on the internet, yet how effective can it really be in the end?<\/p>\n

It seemed to be one of those perverse arms races where no one really believes advertising is effective, but that they can’t stop advertising as long as their competitors are flooding the airwaves, billboards, and internet banners. So many people had such a vested interest in keeping the advertising dollars flowing that no one stopped to think about it.<\/p>\n

I had a chance to try out some internet advertising recently: Google Ads gave me a free credit to give them a whirl. So I picked out some key words, spruced up the landing page for my book, and let the ad campaign rip. <\/p>\n

Maybe the problem is I’m too much an educator, and not enough a salesman, so even having the ads drive people to my page wasn’t enough to sell them on the book. A big case of TL;DR. Or maybe all the hits were from bots trying to scam Google and the advertisers of their money so the probloggers can make some “passive” income. <\/p>\n

What I know is this: it took only a few days to blow through $100 in free advertising, and I made one <\/em>$5 sale (and that’s the gross!). That’s not a good return on investment: not even close enough to start down the path of “maybe if I optimized my key words or reconfigured the layout of the landing page or…” That’s just awful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve always been a little dubious about the effectiveness of advertising: even as a kid without leaving the house, I’d be exposed to hundreds of ads a day just by watching TV. Sure, advertising is needed in some cases, particularly for new products (how else would I have become hooked on Special K cracker chips, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1131"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}