In recent times many new users have joined the amazing Gridcoin community. They may not be aware that Gridcoin is advertising with Google AdWords. In this post I hope to give some insights what is going on in terms of marketing.
Payment process
Gridcoin has an AdWords budget of $11.5/day. After this limit is exceeded no more money will be spent for advertising. Currently one of the most trusted community members @vortac is managing the AdWords account. He pays for the marketing himself and the Gridcoin foundation pays him in rewards with Gridcoins. The Gridcoin foundation holds currently about 22 million GRC with a total worth of $704,966. (address information)
This money is used to pay for the marketing and to pay the Gridcoin core developers. More about the developer compensation can be read here.
Current campaigns
Google search
In the month of september about $257 have been spent for showing Gridcoin ads when users search for BOINC.
1200 users have clicked this ad and we payed $0.21 per click. This is shown in the screenshot above. AVG CPC stands for average-cost-per-click. Gridcoin pays for the ads only if a users clicks on it.
Keywords
The screenshot below shows for which keywords the Gridcoin ad is shown. As you can see the most promising keyword is not surprisingly BOINC. For some keywords the budget of Gridcoin is just too low to have the ad shown. One example of this is the
PrimeGrid keyword.
Age diversity
The Gridcoin ad is most clicked by people which are between 25 - 34 years old. Funnily a click of a 65+ year old is more expensive than the click of 25 year old.
Gender diversity
Not very surprisingly the ad is clicked more by men than by women. Maybe the Gridcoin community should sit together and try to get more women involved in the project? ;)
Devices
Most of the clicks happen from a computer. But most of the impressions (number of times the ad is shown) are also from a computer. So there's no surprise here.
Display campaign
For the display campaign Gridcoin has a very low budget of $0.5/day. This results also in a very low clickrate. Only about 11 people have clicked the ad in the last month.
Placements
The display ad is currently only shown on gpugrid.net. This allows us to specificly target people already interested in BOINC and distributed computing.
Bottom line
As you can see the current marketing budget is relatively low. Maybe it is worth to start a poll about increasing it. I talked with vortac and he said he would still pay for it if we doubled the budget from $300 to $600 a month.
If anyone is interested in viewing the AdWords statistics on their own get in touch with @vortac and he will give you access as he did it for me. Thanks to vortac for managing and paying for the Gridcoin AdWords campaigns!
Glad to see people taking interest in our AdWords campaigns! Just a few clarifications:
Approved budget per day is $10 (we had a vote on it). I set it to $11.5 in AdWords to prevent underspending. At the end of the year, if we are a little bit over the budget, I can easily stop the campaigns for a day or two to match the budget exactly. Underspending is trickier, you can't catch up in just a few days (it usually takes some time to ramp up).
GPUGRID campaign isn't limited by budget, but by a low visibility and low number of clicks. We could set its budget to $100, we would still get only a couple of clicks. They support only text ads and they are placed at the bottom of the webpage, using some thin grey fonts i.e. they are practically invisible (and easily blocked by AdBlocker). I guess they don't find advertising revenue that important (they probably have University support anyway).
In September, $257 was spent for Google ads and another $45 on other ads (BOINCstats, Free-DC, coinmarketcap etc). Total=$302, only $2 above the approved budget (for 30 days, it's $300). I am constantly monitoring it, to stay as close as possible to approved budget.
AdWords access rights:
Thanks for clarification and sorry for my misunderstanding.
Following your blog. Love reading about Gridcoin. Have a good one @grider123
Thank you very much. I'm following you too. Always interesting articles from you :)
I am not in favor of increasing the marketing budget until the team requirement is removed and we are able to ensure scalability is there.
I would like to vote on this topic: I will vote to double the budget as the foundation seems wealthy. Additonally: it is a win-win situation: the more advertisement, the more people notice gridcoin, the more people buy gridcoin, the more the price of gridcoin goes up :-)
Sounds like a good idea to me.
This sounds great -- thanks for the update.
Has anyone thought about Facebook ads targeting not just BOINC users but possibly also people interested in cryptocurrency more generally? Facebook seems pretty good at targeting the right demographics -- I get lots of crypto-related "suggested" pages/articles in my news feed, probably just because I've already liked a few cryptocurrency pages.
Anyways, it's great hearing about the marketing already being done!
That sounds like a really good idea. We should really consider this as a second advertising platform.
TY for stats and the write-up! We'll break down that gender wall one day.
I think we should ensure that we have a stable client (something devs are working on nearly non-stop) before we ramp up advertisements. Though I don't know much about adwords and how it truly affects our user-base, so don't take my opinion for much here = ).
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~32 million rest in various change addresses ;)
Extra $300 I would rather see channelled into development efforts than ads. It seems people easily end up on bad forks recently, there is still team requirement, linux clients are excluded from superblock creation, general 'user experience' is not yet polished enough in my opinion...
@vortac @cm-steem Great idea but I have some suggestion. You advertise yourself under keywords like boinc etc. so if people looking for boinc they know whats going on so if I can give you advice change your keywords to cryptocurrency, science etc. then new people get knowledge about gridcoin and boinc.
Targeting science and cryptocurrency keywords would require a huge budget and probably around 90% of clicks would bounce in the end, wasting 90% of spent funds. AdWords is quite expensive and thus not well suited for "let's target everything" approach.
Yea, sure, computational nerds trying to talk to women, you are dreaming mate.
(sarcasm alert)