Photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

Scanning through the November 2007 analytics for www.cerberusweb.com shows 34% of our traffic comes from Google search results. We’ve always had a strong “word of mouth” factor in our marketing, but sometimes we get a bit too proud of that and overlook the benefits of fresh traffic from paid advertising campaigns. To a proud software developer, paying for ads almost feels like prostitution.

In the past we’ve advertised with iNET Interactive (on Hotscripts.com and WebHostingTalk.com) and used Google’s AdWords. Both of those options brought in fresh clicks, but both also delivered a majority of their traffic with an incredibly high bounce rate (people leaving after a single page) and a very short time spent looking through our site (usually mere seconds). With our natural search results doing so well on Google we eventually abandoned AdWords.

Since we’ve just finished up a 9 month development marathon of getting our new 4.0 release into people’s hands, we’ve been taking a survey of our new media advertising options. Things have changed quite a bit in the past couple years.

I took a quick glance through the sites for Slashdot and Freshmeat since they tend to send us a lot of traffic. It looks like OSTG also removed the self-service advertising portal, though they joined up with the FeedBurner Ad Network.

I also took a look at how Merlin Mann served ads over at 43Folders, since his “Inbox Zero” philosophy has a lot of common themes with our web-based helpdesk software. He’s using Federated Media.

There seems to be a consolidation trend by blogs toward Federated Media and FeedBurner, along with a few niche and exclusive networks like The Deck. We definitely wanted to advertise to these blog readers who were already interested in productivity and group e-mail management.

Both Federated Media and FeedBurner offer self-serve, web-based advertising portals. You can log in, select your audience, upload your creatives, schedule the campaigns and pay through PayPal in a matter of minutes.

On Federated Media’s network we selected an initial audience of: 43Folders, TechCruch, Mashable and VentureBeat readers. Mashable was a long-shot, since it’s practically an anti-productivity site, but we felt a kinship with the spirit of mashing web applications. We mixed textual and leaderboard (728×90) graphical banners.

Photo by Somewhat Frank

FeedBurner offers you a choice of Networks and Channels, which group together subscribers and feeds, respectively, into simple packages like “Venture Capital” and “Digital Culture”. We chose to advertise to the Venture Capital and Entrepreneur networks. This gave us coverage on about 230 blogs, which was also useful for wide-scale brand exposure. We only ran textual ads with FeedBurner.

Our initial batch of ads went live the following morning. The campaign had a simple message to try out: “The biggest obstacle in replying to your daily e-mail shouldn’t be your inbox”.

We use Google Analytics to monitor traffic on our websites. Federated Media and FeedBurner also offer simple “click” statistics for your campaigns. It was easier to just follow along using their interfaces, since our primary mission was to figure out which audiences responded the best to our message and then throw our money behind those campaigns.

After two weeks, the top result with Federated Media was rather surprising. 43Folders did very well, as expected. Mashable and VentureBeat did abysmal, which wasn’t a big shock. But it was TechCrunch that was the undisputed champion in delivering high-quality eyeballs to our project website. It brought in more clicks than all the others combined and doubled, at a cost of about $2.66 per click. One sale buys us around 188 more clicks (in theory, since you can also buy run-of-site text ads for a week that don’t count impressions).

On the FeedBurner side, the Entrepreneur network had a decent click-through rate but very few impressions – reasonable, since it only counted for 15 blogs in the total coverage. The Venture Capital network, however, brought in far more clicks than all of our ads at Federated Media. The average cost-per-click was $3.52. One sale buys us around 142 more clicks – 75% of what TechCrunch delivers, but to a much bigger audience (230 blogs vs 1). That wide-scale branding is worth a small trade-off, and there is room in our future campaigns for both.

In the end, we decided to make TechCrunch, 43Folders and the Venture Capital network at FeedBurner the backbone of our new paid advertising campaigns. We’re anxious to continue exploring the various sites and channels provided by both networks.

I don’t really have anything bad to say about our experience with either. I found myself wishing FeedBurner would summarize clicks by the individual sites in each channel (it’s pretty obvious why they don’t). You can still infer the sources through Google Analytics. My only trivial complaint with Federated Media was their ad inventory has sold out on popular sites between our campaigns. I doubt people want to see even more ads on blogs, so the real answer is for both networks to continue growing and encompassing more blogs with topics we feel an affinity with.

It’s probably not the smartest business move to disclose where we’re finding success with our advertising — but it’s healthy for the blogging community as a whole to promote funding for those who are freely sharing knowledge and not holding back.