Web Advertising?

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to get people to check out my little restaurant guide. I’ve tried a few different channels that I’d like to talk about.

First of all, I am currently willing to spend about $100 per month; this is because I fund this endeavor out-of-pocket. Since I launched the site back in July, I’ve tried buying Google adwords, and also experimented with Facebook ads. When I first configured my Google ads, I was getting about 8 clicks per day, but I was getting a lot of users that I simply couldn’t offer value to (foodfinder.net is still has very limited US restaurant coverage). On the next round, I did a bit more targeting by geography both in terms of keyword selection and making my landing pages a bit smarter. By click rate dropped to 2-3 per day, but my bounce rate also fell by about 10%.

Facebook offers super targeted advertising, but I started with a small geographic search area (San Diego and surrounding cities). This yielded about 1-2 clicks per day (although my total ad spend was under 10 dollars over a 14 day period).

Clearly, I’ve got a steep learning curve here. I think I’m going to try some less conventional forms of advertising. A friend and co-worker who just release a cool viral object tracking game site turned me on to a cool new ad channel. The site is called Girl in Your Shirt and it takes an innovative approach to marketing via social networking.

This will be my next endeavor--I’ve got shirt printing now, and will soon drop $75 bucks to see what kind of traffic this can drive. I’ll keep you posted. In the mean time, any thought on how to spend $100 a month to drive some web traffic? I’d love to hear your thoughts.