Join the new world

I guess this is a bit of an early Christmas present for those of you who are still reading whatever interesting articles you can find over the holiday. No innovations in this article, just some advice about advertising for those who want to maximize the number of clicks they get with their gold. Not that the clicks lead to votes or subs or comments. That's the job of your article.

I’ve run a few ads in my days. There’s more to advertising than picking a nice picture and coming up with a catchy slogan and throwing gold behind it. Those who manage the campaign, click by click, will get more bang for their buck. Here’s what I’ve found.

1. I tried to stay away from this in hopes of maintaining some unnecessary ethical code. The number one tip is: Sex Sells. Get some hot chick in the pic of your ad. Whatever the article is about and whatever you put under the pic, just put some eye candy up. Folks appreciate it and articles with hot chicks tend to get more votes though I can’t say this helps get your actual message across. Your audience is predominantly male and horny.

2. Know your audience. You can tune your ad based on region in the world and a few general types of players, like voters or party presidents. Figure out who you’re targeting, what will likely appeal to them, and act accordingly. I didn’t track it closely enough to say for sure, but it seems sexual oriented ads do better in ‘westernized’ countries like the USA. No doubt due to our lack of any morals. Not that they did badly in other countries.

3. Do short bursts. Your impressions get torn through, especially in large population countries. You can expect to get 4 to 10 times as many clicks if you run your ad for a few minutes and watch it, refreshing the ad page every few seconds to see how many impressions and click you’re getting. Stop it but keep your gold in the ad. Run it in some other country where folks haven’t seen it or run it at a different time so you get people who log in at different times during the day. There’s no point wasting impressions on the same couple of dozen people who have already seen and ignored it or clicked it.

4. Global gets the most clicks but also uses the most impressions. I ran my latest ad globally for about a quarter of the time it was up. It takes close watching and you don’t want to let your entire budget get swallowed up without doing some country specific advertising, but global advertising is a good thing in really short bursts, like 30 seconds to a minute tops.

Just to give you some perspective, I’ve run over 10 ads and most saw less than 50 clicks for a gold. These were entirely unmanaged. My latest ad has been closely overseen each time I put it up. I have used it in over 10 countries as well as globally. I have changed the pic and words to keep it fresh when airing it to an audience that may have seen it before. It has been put up at roughly 3 different times (afternoon, late night and early morning). The results are substantial. With less than .9 gold the ad has garnered over 200 clicks. The extra couple of minutes you put into watching it is well worth the added effectiveness.

Merry Christmas! You can expect more talk about Governors sometime over the weekend.