Project Wonderful and odd results

Recently (Ok for the last couple of weeks) I've been experimenting with Project Wonderful for ads. The cost for Google ads is prohibitive for smaller advertisers, and from a content providers some sites that use ad-sharing then fail to accept Adsense codes from users outside the US. My personal feelings towards Google Ads are also not rainbows and fairies right now.

Project Wonderful offers ads on sites which apply. Advertisers bid on the sites per day and can either select the site or personally bid. First impressions from me are favourable: the tracking and reports are easy, so is setting up the ads and making bids. The cost is far lower than GoogleAds - I've sent a whole $3 for 60K views and a lot of clicks in two weeks.

However there was a very interest effect in the results of the ads. As one of my tests I put up some free advertising for free ebooks. Free adverts only have a two day run, so it was very short, but it brought a few hundred hits and no clicks. That's when I noticed the odd result and ran it again.

Both times my number of downloads went up for the second day the ad was live, and for a few days after that. It tailed off fairly quickly. The increase wasn't great, but was measurable (about triple the daily downloads I would expect). I'm not sure of the cause, since there were no clicks. Users may be googling the ad, or clicking on it to grab the URL and pasting into their own browser or a preview tool.

This isn't the real issue. What caught my interest was that the number of page views during the period remained static. Effectively I had the same number of visitors but those visitors were massively more likely to download the book. For every ten visitors, eight downloaded the ebook.

This is something I will be looking into, with another control test. This advert is live again for a third run, but I will be trying a different advert for another free ebook and seeing if the same thing happens.

Overall though, I'd have to say my opinions are favourable - I might sign some of my sites up as hosts. The final big point in their favour? They use paypal.