My first experience with web advertising (reddit and Facebook ads).
Recently I decided to partake in the AIDS/LifeCycle 2012 bike ride fundraiser. This event is a 7 day, 545 mile ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles. The event itself requires all participants to raise at least 3,000 (USD) dollars to participate in the ride. The event generates funds for SF and LA non-profits that help provide public services that our state is unable to provide.

My first online advertising attempt was to buy a 24 hour sponsored post on Reddit. These are the ads that show up in a darker blue color, at the top of the front page. This ad cost me $20 USD.

The post for my ad is here:

http://www.reddit.com/comments/pi1k4/hi_reddit_im_doing_a_7_day_545_mile_bike_ride_for/ which linked to my donation page (http://www.tofighthiv.org/goto/chrisb)

As you can see in the comments, at first I had a grammar fail that caused all the comments to be about my error (expected on reddit:) ). I emailed reddit to have the error mid way through the day. They were nice to take care of this as the website was giving me errors. It also seems that once you post an ad, you can't edit the topic text. This ad was shown across all subreddits.

Stats on the ad (reddit ad traffic page):
http://i.imgur.com/PNxgB.gif

Outcome of this ad:

I had one donation for $25 USD. This was great, I made five dollars more than if I had just donated the money I used for the ad directly. I had hoped for more, but I will take what I can get.

With the reddit ad you only have two choices on who sees them. One is to have it displayed on all subreddits, and the other is to display the ad on only specific subreddits. I would imagine that reddit is sitting on a stockpile of user data in the user posts that could be used to create profiles of the users which would help in targeting them. Maybe they can tell who is male and female, or maybe they could tell what your interests are based on the content of your posts? Someone who posts about ron paul all day might be a good target for opposing politicians who want to change their vote?

The facebook ad:

I found a $50 dollar coupon for facebook advertising so I figured I should give it a shot. I've ran the ad for a couple of days now. In contrast to my reddit ad, I decided to target specific groups of people.

facebook ad stats and info:
http://i.imgur.com/fDDZX.gif

From what I gather the CTR rate that I am seeing is extremely low. I'm sure a donation is less intriguing than most ads that are displayed so I am not too surprised.

Conclusion:

I've found that advertising a donation request is very unpopular. I almost wonder if it is possible advertise something like this with any success at all.

I wanted to post my experiences here for anyone else who has never used online advertising. It has been interesting to see how something as small as a choosing a contrasting color for a graphic can make a difference on how many clicks you get. I've learned a lot, and now have even more motivation to work on a project of my own (such as writing an iOS or Android app). I can imagine if advertising works well for someone, it could be addicting.

I'm very shocked to see how expensive a click is on facebook/google adwords. I know that I personally accidently click ads more often than I do so on purpose. I'd hope that there is a way to cancel these clicks out. I assume this might be hard to do technically.

Side comment:

Google AdWords: I had planned to pay for a Google ad but soon found out it would not be possible. The site that I wanted to link to is not a top level domain: www.domain.com but rather url with a path: http://www.tofighthiv.org/goto/chrisb After contacting google to see if there was another option I found out that there wasn't. They were generally helpful which is a contrast to the support experience I usually hear about Google.

My question:

Does anyone who is an expert in this area have any tips for me to make my advertising more successful? Are there any guides that are online? I'm most likely not going to be spending any more money on another ad (for my donation site anyway) unless I come up or find a good idea that could make the ad more effective.

Thanks.