Hacking Advertising One hacker's attempt to figure out advertising.

I’ve been a little distracted from the goal of hacking advertising. I’ve been working on my latest creation, SoundSeed.Me – hopefully I’ll be able to resume these efforts sometime soon.

Have to admit, I’m slowing down a bit. This is harder than I thought it would be. I don’t feel like I’m making much progress. I also don’t feel like I’m taking the right approach. Almost like I’m taking an overly superficial approach, simply exploring all of the stereotypical ways to approach advertising, and not discovering any true insights in to the way to most effectively advertise a product.

That and I’m working on a new product, which is much more up my alley. Hopefully I can dedicate some more attention to this exploration after I’ve launched the new product.

Ok, it looks like my ads have been performing poorly enough that the CPC for me to get impressions has been driven up (my theory at least). I’m not getting any impressions even at $1.15 CPC. So I’m going to try switching back to CPM to see if I can get more impressions more quickly.

It would seem that Facebook has blocked me. All of a sudden none of my tests are running. Before I was able to get inventory at $0.75 CPC, not I can’t get inventory at $1.15 CPC.

Makes you wonder if anyone is having success running ads on Facebook…

Just stumbled across this interesting advertising hack:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/08/hacking-online-advertising.html

The basic idea is to buy Google Ads for a specific person so that when they Google their name they’ll see your ad. Since not too many people will be buying ads for that person’s name then it won’t be very expensive and will very likely get their attention.

Creative hack

Having completed a whole bunch of tests I’m come to the following loose conclusions:

1. I’m wasting money. Going to switch to a CPC model to ensure that I at least get some clicks for each test. Should be able to get something like 3-5 clicks at least for $1.50 spend, which may also provide more similar numbers between tests.
2. I’m not really moving the needle at all. I think I need to stop just iterating on little things and get a little more creative, really try different images, different headlines, different copy before going in and tweaking too much. See if I can’t get some more dramatic swings in the numbers.

This is a blog dedicated to hacking advertising.

Basically I got fed up with my inability to get press and my failure to achieve reasonable rates when advertising through Google and Facebook in my efforts to get the word out about my products. My few efforts results in high cpc’s and little to no conversions.

But I kept reading about how others were achieving success through these mediums and so I’ve decided to attack it aggressively and see if I can’t figure it out. I also decided that I should share the results. There’s just not enough information out there about how to leverage these services and marketing is such an essential part of most businesses that I figured this effort would help a lot of people.

To start I’m going to focus on Google Adwords and Facebook advertising as they offer the most inventory, so if I can hack them well enough I should be able to get a lot out of it.

And we’re off.