Why Did I Consider Paid for Ads?
I wrote a post about focusing on some of my strengths in order to minimize risk in new areas, and part of that meant focusing on increasing brand awareness for DevLeader as a proving ground. The idea of driving more web traffic to my blog via ads came up because I was interested in experimenting with Instagram ads for my show car branding, but not knowing anything about paid for ads made taking that first step feel pretty risky.
What should I expect for paying for ads? What will $1 get me? What will $10 get me? I have no idea where to start with this kind of thing, so I felt it was important to use my more solid brand, DevLeader, as the basis for this experiment. If I can watch what happens with traffic to this blog by playing with ads, then I can apply that learning to my vehicle brand.
Free Credit For Ads!
One thing that I found when playing with some of my SEO tools is that many paid-for ad services will actually give you a coupon or some sort of matching credit for using their ad service. What does that mean? Well, like almost everything in life... if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The coupons or credits don't mean that you get to pay nothing for your ads, but it's still a cool opportunity. Generally, these services will say "If you spend X dollars with our ad service, we'll give you a credit to worth Y dollars that you can use for your NEXT set of ads".
Make sense? They want to cover your NEXT purchase you make with them to get you on board with them. So it's not a free experiment to try this out, but it means that if you're going to drop $100 into it, that $100 might technically stretch out to be valued at $200 if you were to get a $100 coupon from one of these services.
Just something to think about! If you're serious about looking into advertising and you're willing to make the initial investment, it seems like a great opportunity.
Google AdWords
The obvious choice for me to start with was Google AdWords because all of my accounts are linked up in someway through Google at various points, and I use a lot of their tooling. The setup was very simple, but you'll need to remember to have your credit card on hand. Like I said, nothing is free. You can stop your ads at any time though, so you don't need to be paranoid about accidentally spending $500 on an ad. I mean, I think it would be difficult to have that happen and I'm a total newbie.
Google AdWords guides you through setting up your first ads pretty well, especially for someone that's never done this before. When it comes time to pick keywords and bidding strategies... I sort of just guessed. It's an experiment, right? They offer tools to measure your metrics, so you can try changing keywords to see how the effectiveness changes. I started by creating a search campaign that would maximize clicks. I set my spending limit to $3/day. Picked some popular keywords for my blog, like programming, C#, and Unity. And... now I wait to see what happens! I hope to follow up on all of this experimentation to share my learnings in this area so that anyone else on the fence can learn from my experiences.
For free credits, Google AdWords claims to match up to $150 of your first months spending, so I think I'm going to try shooting for that. I'll start off at spending $3/day and see if I can experiment with a few different options for ads. By the end of the first month, I hope to use all $150 of my initial investment so that I'll have $150 from Google to play with in the upcoming months!
Bing Ads
Bing Ads was a cool option to explore after setting up Google AdWords, so I suggest if you're going to try both of these that you do Google AdWords first. Once I created my account for Bing, I was actually able to import my Google AdWords campaign I created extremely easily. I didn't even have to think about it. I plan to measure the return on investment of both of these with the same campaign setup to see which one is more effective.
The great thing about Bing Ads? Once you spend $25 (USD), they'll give you $100 (USD) for your next purchases. Just a $25 experiment that if it works well, I can get 3x the investment back to play with! Very cool!