We're brand new, we're just starting in the biz, we most likely enjoy what we do, and we want to share it with the whole Verse. Many webcomicers new to the scene, turn to Project wonderful for their advertising. We did.

Project Wonderful is a great tool. An amazing tool. We, as webcomicers have the opportunity to target adds to a very specific audience, for a very low price.

We are by no means advertising professionals (otherwise, we wouldn't be doing webcomics). Keep this in mind as you read this series of articles. We just wanted to share some insights with you, and discuss them further if you please. We'll publish a series of articles on this subject in the following days/weeks.

First things first, our sources

We decided to start our PW campaigns after reading the following articles. If you haven't read them already, well... you could. It doesn't hurt.

  • Advertising on Project Wonderful from Psychedelic Treehouse, which almost always is THE starting point for all our information campaigns. Be they thanked here, yet again.
  • Adding Project Wonderful to an Ad Chain by Kez (Winged Wolf Studio), refines the notion of ADD CHAINS. We won't be discussing add chains in these articles which focus on our PW experience, but we will in the near future, and it's worth having some notions on the subject
  • How much traffic does $19.95 get you? Part 1 and Part 2 by Phil Newton ; this one is very interesting too. Phil quantifies the relative benefits of Free VS paid campaigns. Information is scarce on the subject.

J. Gray tells us about the utility of doing 'research blitzes' to evaluate PW add campaigns. In a few words, this means that you shouldn't advertise haphazardly (seldom works if you believe in Murphie's laws) but rather try and gather information about where your best chances lie.


Obviously, if you're doing a fantasy webcomic, advertising for it on other fantasy webcomics' sites seems a good idea. And the data we collected so far tend to assert that. On the other hand, everybody will be doing the same, so you'll always be in the average. Successful advertising lies in getting the most clicks for your bucks. You might want more than the average.
Doing a Research Blitz consists in testing, in a short period with a limited budget,  a whole bunch of sites through different groupings : by keyword, by frequentation, by whatever you can think of. Luckilly, Project wonderful gives its customers a lot of flexibility to do so.

But then what ? Then, you have to collect, and analyse the data. J. Gray advises the use of sitemeter, a trafic measurement website which offers a free (limited) service and really IS easy to monitor. Then he advises, and here lies the core of the problem, to try and find the signal through all the noise, in terms of 'usefull visits'. Where do they come from, at what time of week/day, and if you can figure it out,... why.

Though we use google analytics and another bunch of tools, we subscribed for the paid sitemeter service which enables us to download a CSV file containing pre-digested visit data. The fee is reasonable, by the way. Then we designed a Perl script which gathers info from PW, sitemeter, and other sources, to analyse the trends, and build our own metrics.

Enough for now, my head aches from that Burgundi I had for dinner, and it's 3AM here. So next time, we'll talk about metrics, and the measurement of 'useful visits', or at least of the way we managed to measure them. Nothing revolutionary, but it helped getting started.