Feedjit Rush Advertising - is it worth the money?  Review of the new service

As a small business owner, I’m always looking for inexpensive and yet effective ways to advertise my online store.  Therefore, I was intrigued when I received notice of Feedjit’s new advertising opportunity called Feedjit Rush.  For $49, you get 1 million impressions on the Feedjit Widget.  It seemed like a pretty reasonable deal, so I decided to give it a try.

I put together a simple ad (with all the characters and lines allowed) which was as follows:

Princess Time Toys
Princess & Storybook Halloween Costumes

The service is easy.  You choose if you want to start your Rush immediately or schedule it.  I scheduled it for Sunday evening, 5pm Pacific Time/8pm Eastern time.  This has generally been a heavy time for my site and I wanted to take advantage of sending additional browsers who might want to purchase.

Everything is done automatically – no interaction by another human is necessary.  Confirmation emails were sent, and email when the Rush started, and another to watch as the Rush happened.  In the end, I also received the following information on how the Rush performed.

Your Feedjit Rush Information:

Your Feedjit Rush stats are shown below. Reload this page to update them. Note that you will continue to receive clicks on your ad at least 30 minutes after your ad has finished running.

Scheduled to start: 26 Sep 2010 05:00:00pm
Approval status: Approved
Display status: Rush completed.
Number of Impressions: 1000000 impressions
Number of Clicks: 35 click

Your ad targets the following countries:

So, the clicks cost me $1.40 each, about double what Google would have charged me for them and no purchases. Will I try it again?  No.  The cost-per-click is just too high.  Now I realize content is partly to blame.  Had I posted that I was giving away free iPad’s, I’m sure my click through would have been amazing.  However, since most of us are not in the business of giving away things, I just think Feedjit Rush underperformed.

After some more investigation, I discovered that many sites have their Feedjit widget very low on their page, so even though there was an impression on the page, the likelihood of anyone seeing it is slim. Should Feedjit decide to up the impressions to 5million for the same price, I might give it another go.

My recommendation? Skip Feedjit’s new Rush advertising in its current configuration.

:me: