About 3-4 years back I used Google adwords to advertise RakNet. It was a good deal then. My daily budget was $3 a day. I got $100 worth of clicks, with the average click through rate at 2% and the average cost per click at 5 cents.
At the same time I looked at regular banner advertising. It was like $1500 for one month with no guarantee of clicks at all. By an order of magnitude Google advertising was better than banner advertising. So I signed up, but due to lack of funds at the time without a proportional increase in sales I stopped it.
I’ve tried Google advertising again two weeks ago. Now I can’t even show up for the same terms, and they want $5 per click to do so! Outrageous considering 99% of people who click on an ad won’t buy anything. The average click cost is 25 cents, the daily maximum is $20 and there is a notice saying I am not receiving 79% of my eligible impressions. In other words, they want $5000 a month for what I did with $100 a month before. While I am getting clicks through the content network, I think most of those are fraudulent or not relevant. There are more guests online in the forum, but those are probably spam bots, since if they really were new users I would be getting a proportional increase in help posts, and I haven’t been. I’ve been also getting more junk email about website ranking, so that’s another sign it’s just bots.
I’ll give it another two weeks and cancel if I don’t see a justifiable increase in new user posts on the forum. No sense in paying money just to get more spam!
I’m going to also look into a banner ad on GameDev.net if the price is comparable. However, a friend who runs a major gaming site said he had to refund an advertiser’s money because it only got 3 clicks out of 2 million impressions. So I’ll have to ask them if they have any guarantee of clicks, and average number of clicks per ad.