Project Wonderful Not Reporting Right?
By skolor | June 30, 2008
Sorry about not posting on Friday. I was super busy. I decided to try something, something super cool that I did with Project Wonderful, and, if it worked, will be posted about in around 2 weeks. Then again, if it didn’t work, I’ll be disappointed, and post it anyway. Anyway, I did a whole lot of research into Project Wonderful, and found some cool stuff, which I’ll be posting in the near future.
I found something rather disturbing though. At first, I thought it must be a reporting error with Google Analytics. Certainly it must be a problem with their Java Script loading wrong on my site, there’s no way that Project Wonderful would be off by this much. However, I can’t come to any other conclusion except that they’re not telling the entire story when it comes to clicks. I tried it again, with a number of different statistics software and here are the results I found:
- Project Wonderful Ads - 3 ads run, all link to the same site. According to Project Wonderful, I received 198 clicks from one ad, 115 from another, and 61 from the third, for a total of 374 clicks from Project Wonderful, total, over the past 5 days. According to Google Analytics, I received 77 clicks, including 10 from a forum I frequent. That means 21% GA caught. Cost - $2.98. $0.0079 PWCPC/ $0.387 Calculated CPC.
Ad #2 (sorry, the rest will be numbered, don’t want to reveal details quite yet) - Single ad, links to unique site. Project Wonderful - 309 clicks. Google Analytics - 25. 8%. $1.98. $0.006397 PWCPC. $0.0792 Calculated CPC.
Ad #3 (same as number 2, the rest will be the same) - PW - 37 Clicks. Reporting Software - 17. 46% $0.30. $0.0081 PWCPC. $0.0174 Calculated CPC.
Ad #4 - PW - 58. Reports - 14. 24% $0.50. $0.00854 PWCPC. $0.035 Calculated CPC.
Ad #5 - PW - 139. Reports - 45. 33%. $1.91. $0.013758 PWCPC. $0.0424 Calculated CPC.
Ad #6 - PW - 252. Reports - 71. 28%. $4.74. $0.0188 PWCPC. $0.0667 Calculated CPC.
Ad #7 - PW - 28. Reports - 10. 36% $0.22. $0.0076 PWCPC. $0.022 Calculated CPC.
Ad #8 - PW - 1. Reports -1. 100%. $0.0024. $0.0024 PWCPC. $0.0024 Calculated CPC.
Ad #9 - PW - 52. Reports - 16. 31% $0.73. $0.014 PWCPC. $0.0456 Calculated CPC.
Ad #10 - PW - 6. Reports - 4. 67% $0.05. $0.0089 PWCPC. $0.0125 Calculated CPC.
Ad #11 - PW - 43. Reports - 30. 70%. $0.58. $0.0133 PWCPC. $0.0193 Calculated CPC.
Total - PW - 1299. Reporting Software - 300. 23%. Total Cost - $14.00. PW CPC $0.0107.Calculated CPC $0.0467
So. Thats rather interesting. If my math is correct, either Project Wonderful is mis-representing traffic, multiplying it by almost 4x what it should be, or else 3 out of every 4 people who click an advertisement are using some sort of JavaScript blocking software. Either way, it doesn’t really matter which one occurs, since, except for this site, all of those ads linked to sites which require some sort of tracking for affiliate links, which I obviously didn’t receive for almost 75% of the clicks Project Wonderful Claims to have sent me.
There is one interesting thing though. The calculated CPC on my ads ends up being 4.66 Cents per click, and 5 cents per click is what I told myself the maximum I would pay, through Project Wonderful, Per click.
You’ll have to draw your own conclusions about this. I’m not going to jump to any conclusions right now, claiming Project Wonderful is intentionally cheating its advertisers, at least not until I’ve got a lot more evidence. Right now, all I’ve got is a few number that don’t line up. All My ads have stopped for now ($14 limit on them all), so we’ll see if the reporting software keeps registering hits over the next week or so. It may be, like I originally though, just lag with the reporting software. Hopefully thats all it is, and this will turn out to be nothing at all.
Topics: General posting |
July 1st, 2008 at 4:38 pm
There’s definitely some quirks in the PW code. I have two ad blocks on my site, one with four buttons and one with a single banner. Even though they are displayed on the same pages, they have different page view numbers and list different referrers. I’ve tested it, posting a private link in my blog and clicking it. That one click gets shown as four unique visitors in the referrers list.
I don’t think PW is intentionally misrepresenting numbers. I think they’ve got some bugs that need to be worked out.
July 1st, 2008 at 8:51 pm
That may be it, that each of the boxes get counted, so if you’ve got a 10×20 button or some such thing it would appear like the advertisers are getting 200 clicks per actual click.