Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Prest0" data-source="post: 1722714" data-attributes="member: 13621">We ran a banner ad with reallife.com. It is a popular (and funny) webcomic with a mixture of computer and pen &amp; paper gaming humor. We knew it would be an experiment, but we wanted to try to bring in new customers from outside the existing pool. And they were affordable. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I still think we're on the right track, but that particular venue didn't pan out for us. It would have been helpful if we'd had the kind of banner reporting system RPGHost has, but unfortunately all we had to go by was product views and sales source. We got several thousand product views, so we assume people liked the banner... unless webcrawlers were responsible. There's no way to know for sure. Anyway, the big problem is that those six thousand page views didn't convert to sales.In the end, we felt like our money bought us more questions than anything else. Were people really clicking on the banner, or was it hit by a series of webcrawlers? If real people were clicking on the banner but not buying the product, why? Was it because the banner was somehow misleading? Does the product description need to be rewritten? Were new customers turned off by having to sign up for an account? Were they not interested in PDFs? What I wouldn't give for an exit survey...I still think there are opportunities to attract new customers from outside the existing pool of gamers who hang out at EN World, RPG.net, and so on. It's just going to require a long-term investment and a very slow, scientific trial-and-error approach to figure out what works and what doesn't. In the future, I know we'll never run a banner ad anywhere that doesn't offer some sort of live reporting.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Prest0, post: 1722714, member: 13621"] We ran a banner ad with reallife.com. It is a popular (and funny) webcomic with a mixture of computer and pen & paper gaming humor. We knew it would be an experiment, but we wanted to try to bring in new customers from outside the existing pool. And they were affordable. :) I still think we're on the right track, but that particular venue didn't pan out for us. It would have been helpful if we'd had the kind of banner reporting system RPGHost has, but unfortunately all we had to go by was product views and sales source. We got several thousand product views, so we assume people liked the banner... unless webcrawlers were responsible. There's no way to know for sure. Anyway, the big problem is that those six thousand page views didn't convert to sales. In the end, we felt like our money bought us more questions than anything else. Were people really clicking on the banner, or was it hit by a series of webcrawlers? If real people were clicking on the banner but not buying the product, why? Was it because the banner was somehow misleading? Does the product description need to be rewritten? Were new customers turned off by having to sign up for an account? Were they not interested in PDFs? What I wouldn't give for an exit survey... I still think there are opportunities to attract new customers from outside the existing pool of gamers who hang out at EN World, RPG.net, and so on. It's just going to require a long-term investment and a very slow, scientific trial-and-error approach to figure out what works and what doesn't. In the future, I know we'll never run a banner ad anywhere that doesn't offer some sort of live reporting. [/QUOTE]

Verification