Case Study: Discovering Ad Channels by Adify

Good content can be hard to find. As individuals, we spend several hours each week browsing through web pages and trying to find content that's interesting. Advertising networks know that, and they want to make sure the ads they deliver are displayed next to the best and most interesting content. To do this, they crawl the web, trying to identify websites with interesting content. The more websites they know about, the more potential ad channels they have.

Adify is one of the top advertising networks in the country, and they use 80legs to help power their web crawling and analysis of interesting web content as a component of their market mappingTM methodology. To do this, Adify has created their own custom 80legs code to process the content of a web page and determine whether or not the web page or domain provides interesting and relevant content. Over time, they have built several applications on the 80legs platform to tell them whether or not a domain fits potential advertisers' needs. With the scale and customization provided by 80legs, Adify can do this quickly, easily and cost-effectively.

Adify has crawled over 50 million targeted websites with 80legs. When coupled with Adify's proprietary insights and oother industry leading sources of analytics, these crawls help expand Adify's extensive database of websites and create a comprehensive map of potential advertising channels on the web. By mapping the Internet in this manner and creating market mapsTM, Adify is able to provide their customers strategic guidance on content monetization.

Reddit Ad by the Numbers for B2B Services

We’ve started experimenting with various advertising strategies here at 80legs.  So far we’ve mostly focused on Google AdWords, but we’re now looking at other channels as well.

We just wrapped up our first experiment with Reddit Ads.  I recently read both Gabriel Weinberg’s and Jason Wilk’s posts on using Reddit Ads.  Here’s a summary of the results they got with their ads:

DuckDuckGo (Gabriel):
  • Duration: 13 days
  • Cost: $650 ($50 per day)
  • Impressions: 1,288,378 (282,732 uniques)
  • Clicks: 20,700 (18,420 uniques)
  • CTR: 1.61% (6.49% unique)
Whiteyboard (Jason):
  • Duration: 2 days
  • Cost: $700 ($350 per day)
  • Impressions: 299,784 (63,000 uniques)
  • Clicks: 4,226 (4,197 uniques)
  • CTR: 1.41% (6.68% unique)
Here are the numbers for 80legs (note: only ran in Technology section):
Media_http80legsfiles_kexig
  • Duration: 6 days
  • Cost:$120 ($20 per day)
  • Impressions: 402,537 (86,174 uniques)
  • Clicks: 1,327 (1,276 uniques)
  • CTR: 0.33% (1.48% unique)
And here’s some additional data from Google Analytics:
  • Pages/Visit: 2.41
  • Avg. Time on Site: 01:11
  • Bounce Rate: 50.25%
While our numbers seem quite pitiful compared to DDG and Whiteyboard, I’m not exactly disappointed.  Both DDG and Whiteyboard are consumer products/services.  We’re a B2B service, which means our target market is much smaller in terms of # of individuals.  There are going to be far fewer people interested in web crawling than using a search engine or a whiteboard.

The most important factor is ROI.  Our ad cost $120.  I have at least 1-2 people that contacted us expressing interest in purchasing plans or custom services.  Our plus plan is just $99/month, so I’m fairly confident the ad was a “win” for us.

We also had 116 signups during the course of the Reddit ad.  A typical 6-day period will have 80 – 100 signups.  So that’s also good, but not astoundingly awesome.

Overall, I would say the ad worked well for us.  We’re going to try some variations on the ad (targeting specific crawl packages, etc.) and see if that works better.

B2C ads are going to perform better than B2B ads on pretty much any ad channel.  With a positive ROI, the ad was worth the expense and at the very least warrants additional experimentation.