Advertising your 3D Printing business can be a pain. Knowing where to advertise can be a greater pain. In the 3D printing industry, reaching your demographic is limited as general advertising will not be as effective. Therefore, as a business, you need to do niche advertising. There are many 3D printing media sites such as all3dp.com, 3Dprintingindustry.com, 3dprint.com, 3Dprinting.com etc. Are they worth the fees they are demanding just to put an ad on their site?
Analysis of using Google Adsense targeting Ads
I decided to do an analysis using google Adsense targeting ads. This feature allows you to choose which sites you want to advertise in. I ran two types of promotions: promoting 3dprintnerd.com which is on the list and phanes 3dp calculator.
3Dprintnerd.com is a comparison shopping engine that has over 14,000 3D printing products, it is not affiliated with Joel Telling’s 3D Printing Nerd Youtube Channel. This site has a general 3D printing demographic, a good mixture of consumers and professional makers seeking 3D Printers, filaments, parts, and etc.
Phanes 3DP Calculator is a WordPress plugin that allows someone to do instant 3D printing volume/density calculations and offer instant quotes and check out options to their customers. This site caters to professional and any clicks generated from this ad were mostly professionals curious about the product.
Before you review the list of sites, let’s explain a little on how advertising is determined effective. Google made it a standard that click thru rates (CTR) determines if your website and/or YouTube channel is getting quality visitors/viewers. Therefore, in theory, the higher your click thru rate the better quality visitors your site/YouTube channel is receiving. What the standard does not take into effect is the quality of the ad that you are displaying.
Is Facebook a good place to advertise your 3D Printing business?
A popular website, such as Facebook has an average CTR of .01%. That is very low, it is surprising Facebook is still getting ads due to this low CTR. Many ad experts state that a good CTR should be around .3% to .6%, anything above is extraordinary. It is not uncommon for sites that follow the Adsense rules receive an average of 1-3% CTR. Those are the unicorn sites, they do exist. 3Dprinterd.com does get 1-2% CTR in some months, but it even out eventually in other months. Higher CTR just means, that your ads are truly targeting the viewer base. It’s all about demographics, Macy’s will not invest any marketing budget in 3dprint.com, as they do not cater to the 3D printing industry, their CTR rates will be in Facebook levels.
Impressions are the number of times your ad has been viewed on the site. Most ads, have an ad rotation script, which shows a new ad every time you refresh the browser or when someone new comes on in. Therefore, if your site has 5 different ads in the rotation and your site gets 100,000 visitors monthly; it is a good bet one ad has been viewed 20,000 times. Many sites, also have more than one ad slot and it is not guaranteed that your ad will be shown in every slot. So understand, that low impressions on the site does not mean the site is not receiving high visits, just means they have a larger ad rotation schedule.
Review of 3-month analysis
The best websites/YouTube channels to advertise in are the following:
- 3D Printing Industry – they sell ads on their website on top of Google Adsense
- 3dprintnerd.com – Currently not accepting paid advertising
- Tom Stanton YouTube Channel – It is not known whether they accept paid ads and/or endorsements.
- 3D Printing Nerd YouTube Channel – They accept paid endorsement gigs.
- Commando Design YouTube Channel – Uncertain if they accept paid endorsements or ads.
(Obviously We will have to mention 3DPrinterChat here aswell.. Please note that up until today 3dPrinterchat.com have had almost no ads directly in the post content so their stats may be even better if they did.)
This conclusion is based on their CTR rates. These sites/youtube channels receive a higher caliber of visitors/viewers. Now that a general analysis has been done, you as a 3D Printing business can make educated decisions on where to spend your ad dollars.
Thanks for sharing this, as a Graphic Designer, I am always looking for different revenue streams
Interesting, though not sure if advertising a 3D printing business within a 3D printing centric channel is going to draw in customers, who are normally no 3D printing industry insiders.
it will be useful, as many of these 3dp media sites charge by the day, week, month. Unlike google adwords, you only pay by the click. So this article and that list illustrates what you should be careful spending $500 a week at 3dprint.com and wonder if its worth 0.15% CTR.
Great information anybody can use in their 3D printing business.