I’ve been very pleased with Google AdWords to advertise DebatingChristianity.com. I’ve generally been getting 40 clickthroughs per day through the ads. And the only reason it’s 40 is because that’s the maximum I’m willing to pay for per day. I’m only willing to spend $2 per day with 5 cents per click. If I bump up the daily amount, I’ll probably get even more clickthroughs. Since I placed ads last month, it’s gotten a total of 159,507 impressions with 759 clickthroughs (for a rate of 0.4%).
The AdWords also has a very powerful report tool. It can report on almost any data conceivable. It can even email reports on a daily/weekly/monthly basis.
The funny thing is that, at this rate, by the end of the year, I’ll spend way more on marketing than the actual web hosting costs. Though most likely I’ll discontinue the ads when the site hits 200 members.
Recently, the site has also been indexed by Google. (I wonder if somehow the ads influenced the site to be indexed.) So, the site is getting on both the left side and right side of Google results. I’ve also decided to install a search engine logger, so now I can also find out when search engines index the site.