Traffic from John Chow Ad Spot
John Chow’s new blog design went live about a month ago, August 22st to be exact. When the new design went live, so did my new 125×125 ad spot on his blog. The cost of the ad spot was $400. At first my ad spot was on the top left section, then John decided to rotate the ads, which was fine. I had no idea what to expect as far as traffic, but the opportunity was there, so I took it! Like many others, I’m sure you are wondering how the ad performed… here’s how the stats went!
The chart above is the complete run down from August 22nd to September 21st. In the beginning there was a nice amount of click throughs since the layout and all ad spots were new. Click amounts for the first five days were 206, 129, 144, 79 and 93. From August 22nd to September 10th, the ad spot had sent over 1509 click throughs, with an average of 75 clicks per day. The reason I point out stats at this time period is because on September 11th, John made a separate post on his blog about my $10,000 in NeverblueAds earnings. The mention he wrote was part of his "Miscellaneous Ramblings – 9/11/2007" post. The result of this listing was the huge spike above, (what other sites have referred to as the "John Chow Effect"). The mention in his Miscellaneous Ramblings post brought in 403 clicks the first day, 239 the next and 102 the third day. (this is counting any clicks from the 125×125 ad spot as well). As you can see on the chart, a few days after the mention in his post, the traffic was slightly higher than normal.
In the end, the 125×125 ad spot and the listing in the Miscellaneous Ramblings post brought in 2,861 clicks… from 170 different pages off JohnChow.com. This comes out to approximately 92 clicks per day. I would estimate around 800-900 clicks were generated from the the text listing in the Miscellaneous Ramblings post, so if I deduct 900 from 2861, it brings the total to 1961… which brings the new average to 63 clicks per day… at an average of .20 per click (based off the $400 ad spot price).
Here are a few more stats based on the traffic that came over from JohnChow.com. Some key points are that the average visitor spend 3 mins and 41 seconds on the site, while a decent amount of the traffic sent over were new to the site.
In the end, it would be tough to say if the ad spot for $400 was a good decision, mainly because I was not trying to sell or push any product or advertising. The main reason I purchased the ad spot to bring in new readers to the site and to possibly help brand the Zac Johnson logo and blog name. However, at only a .20 per click average, I’m sure this ad spot would do well for any marketing software or affiliate network to bring in new affiliates. Since I was only one of eight different advertisers, I would be interested in hearing how their performance for the ad spot went.
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Interesting how much more effective the post plug was than the actual ad.
I’m one of RSS advertiser(1CoolFile.com) and the traffic is not there at all. I paid $200 for about 100 views(some of it is mine 😉 ). The conversion to a sale is 1 even if I have a $500 contest. Plus, it’s for the Blog Directory part of the site, so it’s targeted at bloggers thus John’s many readers.
The post about the RSS advertisers sent me 22 on the first day. I sent them to a landing page to see results.
Last week, I added an affiliate program that will make money for bloggers and still no sale. Maybe it was over shadowed by Deal Dot Com and BlogRush. 😉 I also added a FAQ to show that I adding a blog will lead to Paid Reviews with more money to bloggers(my cut is 0% in most cases). I have big plans but I need serious bloggers.
The month is not finish yet but still… I hope others did better than me. 🙁
I will make a final post once it’s all over(contest, RSS and other advertising).
yeah john chow had a post of how the ad spot helped the person sell a bunch of million dollar wike pages
Zac,
Where you able to track RSS subscribers increase as well? I guess for me that would be the most important factor when judging if advertising is producing results.
Yeah, the subscriber increase would be a good number to have.
I wonder, John himself pointed out that google AdWords could send in some well targeted traffic. Wouldn’t you pay less for the same amount of traffic?
I will soon test with this as well.
How could him drive such a big traffics to his site?
Thanks for posting these details. I've thought about advertising on sites of that magnitude but never gone through with it.
It's interesting to see stats like this. I've been reading Johns blog for quite a while and he certainyl likes to boast about the "John Chow" effect but I'm not sure it quite lives up to the hype. $0.20 a click is quite a bit if you are not selling anything.
I think it is because we are all use to banners and really no one clicks on them – we have become immune to banner advertising
Well in comparisson with the banner and Review.. Which is better?
Is the $400 for the ad spot per month or you own it?
I guess I'm part of that 2000 odd visitors 😉
Like many have said, interesting stats – it would have been nice to see the subscription increase too. You could perhaps create a redirect page and put in your analytics code? I'm sure you know how to do it better 😉
I'm looking forward to seeing your Adwords conversion rate.
t looks like overall though after you`ve had the peak that you have an increased readership which i guess was the goal.
Thats some very impressive stats. I hope everything goes well. I do know of some places that have some cheaper traffic though (around 1-5 cents per click) if your interested.