Clicksor Pay-per-click: From an advertiser’s perspective

Recently I ran a small budget campaign at Clicksor, a PPC network. There were two objectives of the campaign: 1) To increase the subscriber base for Techcrunchies and 2) To test the effectiveness of PPC advertising. You may view this analysis in different perspectives: How good a PPC campaign is, How good is Clicksor as a PPC campaign or How good/bad I was as an advertiser using PPC method of advertising.

About the Campaign

I had invested just around $20 for this campaign. Primarily I wanted to check how effective and how many visits I can garner through advertising. The objectives of the campaign was to gain as many new subscribers to my blog as possible. Please note that how many I eventually succeeded in getting signed up for my blog need not be directly dependent of the traffic quality that Clicksor sends me as I have also myself responsible when it comes to providing an easy way to subscribe.

The campaign lasted for two days (a budget of $10 per day), 260801 impressions and 113 clicks

Geography Statistics

I think this is one area where I had made a mistake. My targeted audience is global, English speakers and technology savvy. While I had provided the appropriate category (technology, web related) I had provided ‘All Countries’ as the option when it came to choosing the geography. My understanding was that since traffic from USA is always high in anything web related, i will be getting targeted traffic, even when I choose ‘All Countries’. I did realize that I shall be wasting money on the traffic that goes to non-English speaking nations in South America and Europe but decided to let it go for a test campaign since I expected it to be minimal.

But here are the impressions statistics: Germany 8800+ , Brazil 9200, Serbia and Montenegro 7100, Egypt 7200, Greece 12000, Indonesia 11000, India 16000, Lithuania 9700, Turkey 27600, Taiwan 12000…

Apart from India none of the other countries were actually my targets, honestly. I got only about 10000 impressions on US; something same as what I got in Lithuania…I only managed around 1900 impressions on UK. As for the clicks, they were almost proportional to the number of impressions. However, as you would observe the Click-through-rate(CTR) has been really low in this campaign. This “disaster” when it comes to geographical targeting could be because Clicksor has got more partners serving these countries than US or UK. However, it has been an important lesson to not feel lazy about choosing the countries specifically you need to target. It’s better to manually select 50 different countries than let your money go to the traffic who do not need you.

Keyword Statistics

Another blunder from my side: I had inadvertently chosen ‘internet’ as one of the channels for displaying ads. The term ‘internet’ is so broad a term and you should never expect to get a targeted traffic from such a channel. However, my blunder wasted 30,000 impressions and 13 clicks (till I realized it to disable it). The most successful keywords and the impressions and clicks each of them received:

Business Strategy 194000 85
Internet Marketing 28000 10
Google Strategy 3459 2

At the End of it all…

This was my first brush with PPC advertising, and I presume I had not done well enough. But it was supposed to be a test campaign and so the lessons are always there to share. Twenty Dollars, 268610 impressions and 113 clicks later, I had managed to get TWO new subscribers. These two subscribers will have to be the most treasured of all, and I hope you two are reading this review too