I purchased an advertising space, this happened.

Hi all, first post here.

So a couple months ago I got a newsletter email from the envato marketplace (a marketplace where you can sell/buy digital assets for web development), they where telling me the story about this guy who made his first million dollars by selling his art-work and wordpress themes, and to be honest I was very impressed by this, because I never thought that this niche was SO big that a single dude with great effort and quality work could make one million american dollars!

So I thought to myself, well I'm a programmer and I could certainly do some wordpress themes and sell it, but honestly I'm to busy at work and some other projects to do it, but still got that bug that tells you "what if?...", and I went ahead and investigated if the envato marketplace had an affiliate program, and it turns out that they do, however the payment cycle is lame! you can only cash-out once a year, or spend the commissions in marketplace items... but that didn't stopped me and investigated about more marketplaces like envato, and found the TemplateMonster marketplace, which is part of a group called MyTemplateStorage.com they had a decent affiliate program (at least to the eye), and it was easy to join, I even submitted a scanned copy of my passport to verify my identity.

Once there I signed up for the TemplateMonster affiliate program and chose a banner with the correct size, headed to BuySellAds.com and did it! I spent $100 for a full month of advertising space in a site called DeluxeTemplates.com, I did it on september 1st with so high expectations! the site promised about 115,000 impression per month and since it was already about templates I thought: "WOW super targeted traffic here!" doing some math I figured out that if this site converted a low 1% of the impression in clicks, and from that 1% of visitors 1% was a sale, by the end of the month I would be having about 7 sales, covering my advertising expenses and profiting!... so naive me.... here are my results:

The ad delivered about 112,682 impressions according to bsa (2k short of the promised amount... but ok)...



CTR was low! 0.64% behind my expectations

But the funniest part of this was that the templatestorage stats had little bonding to the bsa stats:



come on! with a CTR of %0.64 Template storage should be receiving about about 7k visitors! and they claim I just sent 220

So yes this si a sad story for me, because I lost $100 of my hard earned money jejeje, but at least I had fun! Im going to try again with other ad vendors inside bsa, but first I want to know the community opinion:

• Is buysellads.com honest about their vendors?
• Is the site I purchased ads from sending bot traffic? (this is my main theory)
• Is the templatemonster.com affiliate program a scam!?
• Is contextual advertising worthless?

Tell me what you think about this experiment

 

Hi,
I had some ups and downs with BSA too and mostly because of the sites I advertised on doing some tricks like fake bot traffic or manually inflating clicks. BSA doesn't seem to care too much. I once advertised on a website and they contained an automated javascript clicker on the page source. When I contacted BSA about with proof, they excused and refunded my payment but did nothing about the website. That website is up and running their ads even today, nothing changed.

Now, about some of the other mistakes you did:
-you advertised on a website that promotes FREE themes. This means that the visitors are there because they don't want to pay, they want to get the themes for free, so the chances of them clicking on your ad and purchasing something are slim. You should rather advertise on a design blog.
-you used the default template monster banners. Those are so over used so your CTR will suffer (even on a genuine website).
-templatemonster themes may look good but most lack any special features, which most people are after

Hope this helps
-Peter

 

Buying an ad space on a random site is almost always a waste of money. Just think about it. You have visitors who happen to come to that site probably looking for nothing in particular. Then they happen to see your ad in which they are absolutely not interested, but they still click on it out of mild curiosity. The end result you have a bounce rate of like 99%.

In your case I believe it's the latter one with a slight correction: Contextual advertising on sites that may not have targeted traffic is worthless.

Try AdWords and BingAds instead. That's what I do when I need targeted traffic.