
Ask YC: Where do you advertise online? - epi0Bauqu
I've had some success with Adwords, Yahoo's equiv, FB and StumbleUpon.  Where else do you suggest?
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tom_rath
Currently Google Adwords (Google Search only) and Microsoft's Live.com. Those
two are the only options I've found worth bothering with for B2B software at
this time.

We tried Yahoo: It's a complete waste of time and money. Ads were always
edited by Yahoo staff (requiring frequent e-mails to clarify the service we
were paying for), bids may be changed at random, the interface is a nightmare
kludge and there is no way to opt out of Yahoo's 'partner network' (which
seems to consist only of spam domain landing pages), so bidding a keyword to
the top of the Yahoo search results guarantees a load of expensive visitors
from click-farms. I would love to advertise on Yahoo's search result pages and
will do so the moment Yahoo Search Marketing is taken over by a competently
run organization (Go Microsoft!).

We tried Ask.com: You'll receive a tremendous number of visitors on your first
day, all from spam domain landing pages. There is no way to specify "place my
ads on Ask.com search results only" (which I'd genuinely like to do), so money
given directly to them is wasted. Crazily enough, you can cancel your Ask.com
advertising and opt into using Google's "Search Network" instead. That will
put your ads on Ask's search results without having to deal with Ask.

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iamelgringo
Mechanical Turk is good for getting initial users to use your site and "test
it". Offer them $.10 to test your site and give you some feedback on the site.
It's a good way to get initial beta testers.

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walesmd
Are you able to set a top-limit cap on the amount you spend or the number of
users?

I'd be interested in hearing real numbers, in regards to how much you had to
invest in Mechanical Turk to get a decent response to further your
application.

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RobGR
I have tried AdWords and Facebook. They worked in the sense that people
visited my site, but they did not work in the sense that no one bought
anything from me; however that may be due to my site and product, not the
advertising.

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vaksel
I think internet advertising for web apps is pretty much useless. Sure it
might drive you some traffic, but you most likely won't get a lot of sales. So
unless you have a $100 profit margin on each user, you won't recover the money
that you'll spend on ads.

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rokhayakebe
Affiliate Marketing: Commission Junction, PepperJam Network...

Twitter: using Twitter Search to monitor certain keywords and follow up with
users.

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4016128
(Posting from a junk account just to keep things a bit more anonymous.)

The company I work for spends over $50,000 daily on advertising, for a purely
virtual (downloadable software) product. This is almost, but not quite,
exclusively search advertising. Dollar-wise, over the past few months, the
split is:

Google: 87.2% Yahoo: 8.8% MSN: 2.4% Ask: 1.0%

With LookSmart, CJ, NeverBlue and Right Media taking up the sub-one-percent
slack.

This is (like other people have noted) largely influenced by what our product
is. Search marketing (as opposed to display) is by far best for us, and Google
is by far best of search. There is a chance there are some campaigns I've
missed.

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thorax
Depends on your product some. You might also look into MySpace advertising--
it's wicked easy to try out in their beta ad manager, but I find that the CPC
is pretty high for toying around with at first.

StumbleUpon seems to be a good one for interesting/clever sites in terms of
conversions, and the effective CPC is around $0.05.

With Adwords, there's some fun things digging through and finding keywords
your competitors aren't really looking at. There's also a lot of people
overlooking keywords in unconventional ordering of the words.

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rishi
Adwords has worked for my business. You really need to invest time and money
into it. It was only after my first $3k and 3 months that I started seeing it
work.

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patio11
With the proviso that its going to either take a LOT of time or using
Conversion Optimizer, I suggest taking a look at Google's (AdWords) Content
Network. It is far and away the most effective advertising I am able to do,
consistently clocking even AdWords on google.com

I'm told that experience isn't that common.

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rwebb
i'm jaded but adroll is good for niche targeting.

