Advertising

[WIU0812]

I was thinking it would be nice to use the money that the site raises to get some more members on the forum by advertising. I wonder what it costs to advertise through the Western Courier or something like that?

[ST_Lawson]

Actually, I was considering using some of the extra for ads on Facebook, but depending on the level of $ available, we could do ads in the courier, or possibly even on the radio broadcasts.

[WIU0812]

Never thought about facebook, that is relatively cheap to isn't it?

[ST_Lawson]

It can be, depending on targeting numbers. You can set your budget too, so for example, I can set up an ad to show up for people who:
Live in Illinois
are between 18 and 24
have Western Illinois University listed as their school
have Sports (including any specific sport..football, basketball, soccer, etc.) listed as an interest

which would give me a potential reach of ~10.2k people (according to facebook's calculation of # of people that fit those criteria)

Then I can set the daily budget....$5, $10, $20...or whatever
And I can set a start and end date.

So, if I have $100 to work with for ads, I can run $5/day for 20 days, for example.

Anyway, so yea...we can get pretty targeted with it, and can decide how much we want to spend.

[WIU0812]

Sounds like that may be best way to go for the first run, may want to up that age to 18-30 or something to catch the recent alumni as well.

[ST_Lawson]

Sure, that was just an example. Criteria can be refined before we actually set up the ads.

And really, based on the current rate of ad revenue, if we're targeting during early football season, we probably won't have enough to run anything until next season unless someone wanted to chip in some $ for it or something.
Hosting the site runs ~$100 per year, current ad revenue since we moved to the new site is $78.99 (google doesn't send a check until we hit $100 though, so it's not technically "ours" yet), but based on current rate of earnings (and remember, we launched the new site at the start of summer, so much of the "average" is during the slow summer months), we should be bringing in ~$225/year. Once we build up enough to cover the hosting costs, we should end up with ~$125/year extra, which could go towards whatever (site upgrades, ads to promote the site, donations to the Athletics department, etc.). So I could run essentially a months worth of ads at $5/day on facebook for the first month of each football season, if we wanted to, for example.

[WIU0812]

I would be interested to just see what $20 does and see if anyone who sees the advertisements even joins or not for those 4 days. If that was successful it may be worth looking into spending more then. I would think that in the first week about 50% of the people you would reach would see the advertisement so those interested would check it out.

Does that money come based on the amount of visits the site receives or just on the amount of clicks that the ads get?

Also, I may have missed it, but is there a button somewhere to share this page on facebook that you click and it will pull up your facebook?