Last month I wrote a tutorial on How to “Pubvertise” Your Live FeedBurner RSS Content to a Wider Audience. I also signed up for a one week paid campaign in the FeedBurner Ad Network to try out the service (I had never previously paid to advertise Simplehelp). This post details my experience with the FeedBurner Ad Network.

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The FeedBurner Headline Animator 7 day promo started on Tues, Aug 7th and finished on Friday, Aug 10th. Your grade two math skills probably helped you notice that Aug 7th to Aug 10th isn’t 7 days. What happened is that my credit card was declined (long story), and by the time I was able to get it working again, a couple of days had passed. The very helpful folks @ FeedBurner simply pumped my add more during the 4 days that it was running. You see, when you sign up for a campaign, you’re guaranteed a certain number of ad impressions. Though they only offer an “approximate” number of views, you actually get them all. In my case, because I chose to run my ad in the Computing & Technology category, I was guaranteed 3125 views (other categories have different view numbers). And in that 4 day period, my banner was viewed exactly 3125 times in the various RSS feeds that make up the Computing & Technology group (which includes sites like Slashdot, Ars Technica, Quick Online Tips, Read/Write Web and Wired).

Of those 3125 views, 119 people clicked on my banner/ad. This comes out to about $0.21 per click. Now, because I had my banner point towards my site, rather than my RSS feed, I knew I wouldn’t be significantly, if at all, increasing my RSS subscriber count. What I wanted to do was bring people to the front page. In retrospect, this was probably a mistake on my part. Though I’m quite certain that even if I had pointed my ad to my RSS feed instead of the front page of my site, I wouldn’t have increased my RSS subscriber count by 119 (not everyone that clicked on it would necessarily have subscribed) but it probably would have led to more repeat visitors (subscribers).

Another of my mistakes was to design a rather poorly designed banner/ad. The black background with red text is rather.. ugly. I think it stood out more than some of the other banners, but probably not in a good way. If I had designed a better looking banner, I suspect I would have had more than the 119 clicks.

An interesting aside: my previous tutorial, How to “Pubvertise” Your Live FeedBurner RSS Content to a Wider Audience, was linked to from the FeedBurner Publisher Buzz blog. The link from that blog drove (to date) 216 visitors - almost 100 more than the actual ad campaign. And those visitors averaged 2.68 page views per visit, which is higher than my overall page view per visit number.

Summary

I will run another FeedBurner ad campaign at some point in the not too distant future, and I’ll have a much better designed banner (which means I’ll have to get someone to design it for me, I’m absolutely talentless when it comes to graphic design). I will also have the banner point towards my RSS feed to see if it increases my RSS subscriber count, rather than have it link to the front page of my site. I’ll update this post with the stats/review of my second campaign once it has completed.