Advertising traffic

[Skolor]

This is a little strange. Wednesday I started a fairly large advertising campaign snatching up all the penny ad spaces I could get a hold of on Project Wonderful. At a cost of $1.03, I managed to get 103k page views, and 180 hits (in around 24 hours). I've got a little over 500 bids running for it, 100+ of which are winning at any given time.

Anyway, the strange thing is that Google Analytics isn't reporting it that way. Its very strange, according to Project Wonderful, they've sent me 181 hits, 180 are unique. According to Google Analytics though, I only received 41 hits from links yesterday, 6 of which were from this forum. In addition to that, the numbers don't add up. Google tells me the highest non-bloggeries refferer sent me was a web-comic, which sent me 5 hits. According to Project Wonderful though, they only sent me 1 hit.


I'm a little confused about all this. I'm hoping this is just because of some strangeness because of how the reporting system for Analytics works, but its a little disturbing to know either the software I'm using for statistics is wrong, or else the service I'm using both to publish and and advertise isn't telling me correct stats.

[Bloggeries]

Don't know what to tell you except when I look at GA, Statcounter and AW-Stats I get different very different answers from all of them.

I did notice with PW though that it wasn't matching up when I ran my campaign a few months ago now. Wish I could be of more help but you're reminded me to check and see if I still have any ads going.

Hopefully someone else can shed some light on this!

[speakindoodles]

oh wow...I heavily relied on GA. I think I ought to get more sitemeters now...

[jyale]

my sites stats page picks up pretty much everything. and what it doesnt pick up google does. sounds like people were refered to your page and closed it before it loaded... so there for your not picking up the stats..

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http://www.jasonyale.com - Personal Blog

[Skolor]

That's even more disturbing than assuming one of them screwed up in their calculations; it would mean over half the people who clicked my ad couldn't be bothered to wait the second or so it takes to load (it intentionally only runs PW ads, which load very quick). Only an hour and a half until Analytics updates. Hopefully it will pick up that difference and it was just a matter of the cutoff point for days being strange.

[WhoJayBe]

First, I forgot all about PW and my account lol... I think I have a few dollars in there... also, all stats are going to be slightly off but people take GA the most serious.

[Skolor]

Oh. These aren't a little off. Over the weekend I spent a total of $14 on advertising, which net me 1299 clicks, at least according to Project Wonderful, to 11 different sites. Not bad at all. The reason I caught the discrepancy was because one of those sites was purely for affiliate banners, which only showed a small fraction of the impressions PW said it sent me.


Here's the end result: Project Wonderful Not Reporting Right? Out of the 1299 impressions PW claims to have sent me, I received 300 even according to the software I used. This wasn't just Project Wonderful, I actually used 3 different types of software for this. Even worse, Google Adsense, which I'm running on a few if the sites, agrees with the reporting software, not PW, and I've always had trouble getting Adsense to report impressions right.


23%. Thats the percentage of "clicks" PW claims to have gotten that actually went through to my site.

[WhoJayBe]

Originally Posted by Skolor

Oh. These aren't a little off. Over the weekend I spent a total of $14 on advertising, which net me 1299 clicks, at least according to Project Wonderful, to 11 different sites. Not bad at all. The reason I caught the discrepancy was because one of those sites was purely for affiliate banners, which only showed a small fraction of the impressions PW said it sent me.


Here's the end result: Project Wonderful Not Reporting Right? Out of the 1299 impressions PW claims to have sent me, I received 300 even according to the software I used. This wasn't just Project Wonderful, I actually used 3 different types of software for this. Even worse, Google Adsense, which I'm running on a few if the sites, agrees with the reporting software, not PW, and I've always had trouble getting Adsense to report impressions right.


23%. Thats the percentage of "clicks" PW claims to have gotten that actually went through to my site.

Man, PW sucks, huh? I guess I'm glad I stopped using it for quite sometime now!

[Skolor]

Well, that depends on how you look at it. From an advertising perspective, it looks like I'm still getting around $0.05 CPC, which is better than you'll find just about anywhere. It also looks like their CPM is accurate, I had wondered why the CTR seemed so high, this seems to explain it.

So instead of saying they suck, it looks more like they're just not as awesome as it looks like at first glance.

[growingwealth]

I'd have to agree @ .05 CPC in todays market is definitley low advertising expenses. Are you planning on keeping it going?