In a desperate attempt to increase the readership to this blog, I recently placed a blogad on the Liberty News Forum highlighting this site's immigration coverage. Here are the stats:

page views: 112132
clicks: 5
CTR: 0.004%
CPC: $2.40

Now, obviously, that CPC would be acceptable if I was selling credit cards or something. But, for my purposes it's just a "tad" too high, and the CTR is just a "tad" too low.

The ad wasn't as good as it could be, but it wasn't that bad either. And, it would seem to have been targeted towards potential readers of this site.

I had a similar experience promoting my restaurant directories, placing an ad in the "Celebrity Baby Blog Third Tier". Obviously, it was not a targeted selection, but all their regional sites' CPM was stratospheric, and that site had a relatively low CPM. That got 454405 impressions and the same CTR. At 20 clicks, that resulted in a still-massive CPC of $1.50.

Since people keep buying BlogAds, they must get some kind of results, but as of now I think I'll stick with what works better and is much cheaper: AdBrite and AdWords.

I believe the secret to BlogAds is an eye-grabbing picture. The restaurant ad had a nice picture of pasta, but the LNF ad did not. OTOH, if I'd had a picture of a girl in a t-shirt or a guy humping the carpet, I'm sure the CTR would have been much higher.