I’ve marketed quite a lot through Stumbleupon (crowdsourcing service), usually I’ve pulled quite constant traffic of 2-3 thousand visitors per day and campaign (for both paid and unpaid campaigns).
Now it happened unintentionally with this product:
Well over 25 000 visitors from Stumbleupon and Reddit over the span of 36 hours, I was quite surprised.
Granted the kind of product above does not really sell however the spillover to other products was quite good.
Judging solely on my own sites and projects the onlinemarketing spend seems to be growing quite a lot, at least for such tiny publishers as myself. Last days the average adsense CPC on our german virtuelle Tiere site has been quite a bit over $3, a record for us. The eCPM is also record high on all our sites through most networks we use at the moment. Probably much due to many advertisers doing network wide CPM bids with a very low freq caps.
So this gigantic end of the world economic crisis everyone is talking about is yet to show its face, at least for us 
Facebook social ads saw the day of light start of December, I had been advertising with the beta version Flyers PRO that had gone on for a few months before that, quite an interesting experience.
Starting out with Facebook Flyers Pro about six months ago was great, never have I had such reach for such a tiny price. Facebook limited the budget per account to $250 per day, but there was no problem to sign more accounts and use the same creditcard … which I did in plenty. So far so good …. however after having spent over $10 000 (which at this time meant around 75 000 clicks) I was gonna request some invoices for mine and my partners accounting …. turned out there where none (quick response from customer service though). So what I (*cough* or rather for the most part the poor administration persons, felt truly sorry for them) had to do was to account every transaction for every day for every separate account … you do the math.
Truly sick to release a service without making it possible for the advertisers to get proper invoices however the traffic was so extremely good that we still continued.
With the implementation of Facebook social ads in december there also came a new accountingsystem … great, so this meant that since the new invoices was actually nice … we scrapped our old accounting of the facebook ads and used the new ones instead (so we had to redo everything).
So basically I’m counting on the fact that if I payed $0.15 for a click actual cost was around $0.30 when we added administration costs. Was still worth it though, best traffic I have ever had.
With the hype of socialads the clickprices have now gone up to more decent prices, its still a very big part of my onlinespend though.
The case above shows however what an extremely immature market onlineadvertising still is. How is it possible for one of the worlds biggest mediums to implement an auctionbased system … and it still takes around half a year for most onlinemarketingagencies to catch on (the bigger the agency and its customers the more they seem to suck when it comes to distributing their fancy ads).
Just came home 2h ago from an SEO event in Stockholm that was organized through SEO forum and was hosted and sponsored by Simon at Onlineservices. Thanks for the wine
I was there a very short time (barely 2hours) but bumped into Björn, Dan, Hjalmar, and Samuel.
Was unfortunate that I could not be there longer but from what I saw the event was a huge success, congratz to the organizers.
Its quite fun to see the difference between Germany and Sweden with regard to onlinebehaviour. Through PeoplePath AB we run the sites Djur and Haustierstall, looking at paid membershipconversions through cellphones we can see that Germany has a conversion per unique person of barely 1/3 in comparison to Sweden. In my opinion Germans are much more priceconscious and tends to neglect quality and especially objectivity in favour of cheap prices (with the exception of cars :) ). Quite visible also when comparing German and Swedish supermarkets.