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You are if you’re advertising blindly. You get some level of reporting from Entrecard but it really doesn’t tell you what you should be looking for. It only tells you the number of clicks as a result of placing your ad on a particular blog.

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There is a more valuable measure if you scroll down the page and it’s called best value by widget. It tells you the number of credits per click from each ad that you’ve placed. This let’s you compare apples to apples when you’re comparing advertising on one site versus another.

For example, let’s say you place a widget on Site A for 300 credits and one on Site B for 30 credits. When you check your stats, you find that Site A brought 30 clicks while Site B brought only 10 clicks. Which ad was more efficient? Look at the Clicks/Credits ratio and you’ll see that Site A gives you 30/300 = 10% while site B gives you 10/30 = 33.33% return on your credits. So obviously advertising on Site B is a more efficient way of spending your credits.

If you want to dig even deeper, you can use an analytics package like Clicky which I just reviewed in the previous post.

You can track based on the referring domain and actually see how much time each visitor sent from that domain spends on your site.

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The difference between the “entrecard.s3.amazonaws.com” and “entrecard.com” is that the first one is from clicks from widgets you placed on other blogs. The other referrer is for clicks within the Entrecard site, i.e. other bloggers who are checking out your site as a potential place to advertise.

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You can get the same sort of information from Google Analytics but what you can’t get is the ability to identify how many actions or pages a visitor viewed after coming from the referring site. Clicky shows you the time sequence of each visit, so you can actually track this.

What I’m really interested in are the visitors who spend more than a few seconds on my site. This tells me that they aren’t the surfers who are just trying to rack up credits. These people are actually curious about my site and are potential repeat visitors and subscribers.

So the bottom line is, even though a lot of visits from Entrecard are useless, there are a few that are actually worthwhile for me to keep on advertising with my widget. Also, don’t be fooled by sites that require lots of credits to advertise. It doesn’t really mean that they will bring you more traffic than sites with lower number of credits to advertise.

You should ask yourself when you evaluate a potential blog to advertise on what kinds of visitors that blog attracts and whether those visitors are likely to be interested in your blog.

Want more Entrecard tips?

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