Tired of wasting my Lindens on advertisment

[Logan Sparta]

I advertise to have my product posted on the front page of the feature list but I never see it, its 899L for 7days and I never see it, nor does anyone else.  If I spend my Lindens for advertisement I wanna see the product on the front page.

 

My solution to LL would be to create a Featured Items page for those creators who pay the lindens that want their product placed in the featured stuff, I wouldn't mind paying for it then.  Unitl then its a waste of damn time to advertise anything in featured front page items

[Ry0ta Exonar]

Did you check your listing enhancements report? https://marketplace.secondlife.com/merchants/yourstore#/reports/listing_enhancements

Even if you don't see your ad in the featured items, it's possible other people see it. If you see 0 impression there, then no one see your ad. You might want to file a support case.

[Koltari]

I tried the frontpage for a bit but never got click troughs. Category pages or check-out pages seem to do better for me. I think it's down to what you are advertising. I mostly advertise rentals and I see a correlation between click troughs and people visiting my sim quite clearly on some days. And yes people do "buy" 0L rental adds to get the information notecards. Those who do usually visit my land.

I just made myself beleive there just to many paying for front page exposure that the amount of displays isn't going to be enough. Not only do you need to get on the frontpage. Someone interested in your catagory of product have to be the lucky one to see it as well. I could be wrong though but it made me recall lectures at uni about probabillity and statistics when I took the time to ponder over it.

I guess those with a bit of a advertising fond could pay for enough enhanced adds on the frontpage to make sure they will be seen almsot every time. But it'll cost.

[Chelsea Malibu]

Same thing has happened to me too often so I gave up. I pay for a listing, can never find it, get no sales and then run their report that said I had tons of exposure.  I've never figured it out either. 

The only thing I can figure is that they cycle them throughout the day though that is not at all what they say. If this is the case, then I feel they should be honest and let us know this is the case and then provide us with the times it runs much like with an Ad Flight.

However, that being said, here is an interesting anomaly that happens when I do place a feature add.  Though I've never seen any incremental volume of the items advertised, I do see an increase in sales for everything else. 

[Amethyst Jetaime]

I've tried all the different options and got nothing.  I too never saw my ads and neither did any of the many people that I asked to look for it. I checked several times a day the entire time it was supposedly on there. As far as I'm concerned mine never appeared regardless of what the report said. Its a waste of money.

[Rya Nitely]

It works if you're advertising a really eye-catching skin, cothing or hair. The sort of thing that makes people go 'Oh wow, now that's nice'. Then it works. Otherwise no.

I agree with the probability theory someone raised. I sell boats. Chances of someone looking for a boat just happening to see my homepage feature is very slim. People who want a boat don't scan through the homepage features, They do a search for boats. 

And it's obvious that the homepage features are not the best items available. Many creators who are not getting enough sales pay for enhancements out of desperation. So a lot of people don't look there.

Now, I'll tell you where customers see the good stuff, and it's free advertising -  'What customers are buying now'. That's where the best stuff is...not in features.

So how do customers find the best products? - word of mouth, creator has become known and highly reputed (which takes time), and some people just search the market for high quality listings.

[Toysoldier Thor]

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Amethyst Jetaime wrote:

I've tried all the different options and got nothing.  I too never saw my ads and neither did any of the many people that I asked to look for it. I checked several times a day the entire time it was supposedly on there. As far as I'm concerned mine never appeared regardless of what the report said. Its a waste of money.

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Totally agree with you.  I gave up on MP Xstreet ads longgggggg time ago.  Never seen them - never improved sales at all in the 5 wasted attempted.  It was just throwing money away for me.

EDIT:  In fact one of my times I had an enhancement feature I reloaded the front page for an hour.  I often saw the same ad show up but in that entire hour of over 500 page loads of the xstreet page... I never once saw my ad.

[Ry0ta Exonar]

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Rya Nitely wrote:

It works if you're advertising a really eye-catching skin, cothing or hair. The sort of thing that makes people go 'Oh wow, now that's nice'. Then it works. Otherwise no.

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Maybe this. Since I read so many complaints about homepage featured ads on these forums, I was shy away from that one, but I thought I'd give it a shot for a change 2 days ago and I was surprised to see it's getting four times more impressions and click-throughs than my usual ads I put on category landing pages. I don't think all of those who clicked through are potential customers, but still it would help in increasing name recognition.

ETA : Then again I've never seen my ad on home page, either.

[Lava Babii]

I've tried so many ads and wasted a lot of money until I found what is working:

Offer something very special with a very good product picture for a relatively low price. But make sure that the price is high enough to pay the ad (with a L$ 10 offer you won't get it).

Many buyers will also click through your store and buy other stuff too. The most expensive ads are the best (who would have guessed that? :matte-motes-big-grin-squint:).

 

[Zanara Zenovka]

Yes, it needs to be eye-catching, and something that will create interest for a particular reason.

I only bother with features for products that are (a) particularly new and innovative or (b) of topical interest (eg my Christmas gift scripts did well from features).

Marketing in the absence of decent statistical feedback is a bit of a fool's game (at least old xstreet showed you a graph of each day's hits/sales which showed you clearly how enhancements were performing) but I get enough customers telling me they saw something in features to know it does work to a degree (at least that's one advantage of having to do manual redeliveries - you can ask people how they found something

Mine probably only just pay for themselves, but I also know that I get a lot of repeat business in general, so that any random sale has added value in the likelihood of creating a lifetime customer, more word of mouth, etc.

[Josh Susanto]

>If I spend my Lindens for advertisement I wanna see the product on the front page.

I'm still amazed that that doesn't happen.

It seems to me like it should be an easy fix for LL to at least send ads to the front page of the person who paid for them, so that people at least imagine that other people might also be seeing them.

[Rene Erlanger]

Not sure if Enhancements are worthwhile or not.....i would imagine the results vary in different sectors. I could see them being beneficial in small niche sectors by using "by Category Landing page" Enhancement

 

I found an interesting article today regarding in-world "Classifieds".....it's a bit dated and most likely the results would be worst now...given the SL Viewer changes. It's regarding those expensive top-8 Classifieds In-world

 

http://xdfusion.wordpress.com/2009/03/02/are-the-top-eight-classifieds-worth-your-money/

http://xdfusion.wordpress.com/2009/03/12/are-top-classifieds-worth-your-money-part-2/

 

.

[Ry0ta Exonar]

Wow, that article was interesting indeed. I'd been suspecting those top classifieds people were lindens' alts or friends and they were doing that to jack up the bids. lol

[Bouttime Whybrow]

spending  two thousand US on a classified ad boggles my mind.

i read the article and the results don't surprise me but even before reading the article i would have thought no way could it be worth it.

frankly there are a lot of things in sl that when you do some basic numbers, just don't make sense.

[Rene Erlanger]

Correct....starting with the LL Land Tier system. Other OS grids shown what could be done at much lower costs....admittedly they don't have the overhead that Linden Lab has....but still $295 usd monthly tiers for an Estate Sim is ridiculous.

It's too late for LL to cut Tiers as they're losing both Sims and concurrency, thus Net profits.......but years ago, it should have been priced at a round $150 - $175 mark.

[Rya Nitely]

Quoted from the second article:

Conclusions

The definite winner out of this whole setup is probably Linden Labs. They will make money no matter what happens, even if the servers are down

 

Hooray to this conclusion! When LL stop making money is when we all stop making money.