We looked at advertising with them about a year ago and their options and response were both underwhelming. It wasn't possible to geo-target, it wasn't possible to advertise on most relevant sites (e.g. SoftwareRecs), and their upfront budget requirements weren't compatible with how we normally do things, which is to run a small test campaign to see what sort of traffic an outlet can drive and then expand if it goes well. On top of that, the response from their sales reps was curt and the last message in conversation, once it was clear that we aren't going to drop 50K, remained plain unanswered. So, YMMV.
Hi there! I'm Steve Feldman and I manage the Ad Ops team at Stack Overflow. I'd like to make a few leaps based on your comment and offer a little insight our business. I'm very interested in learning more about your experience.
- Based on your targeting concerns where we failed to adequately meet your request (geo, site, budget), I'm going to assume you tried to purchase advertising through our self-serve option. We offer self-serve specifically for advertisers who want to work with budgets below our minimum of $5,000 per month. In doing so, we hope to allow clients who still want to target our users an option while preventing our salespeople from burning out or being unable to provide an excellent advertising experience due to an excessive client load. Please remember: the long-term success of the Ad Sales team is reliant on the success of our clients and their ability to interact with Stack Overflow users in the smartest, most mutually-beneficial way possible. That takes time.
- Targeting via our self-serve option is limited to global run-of-site. This means ALL tags and ALL countries. Any advertiser looking to reach specifics types of users-- mobile, web dev, cloud-- will see better results working with a sales rep and spending that $5,000 minimum, as impression volumes will be too low to make a real, measurable impact through self-serve. We see greater success for self-serve clients with (a) products that benefit ALL developers and/or (b) products related to some of our larger tags on the site, front-end tags for instance, as the largest volume of impressions go to the largest tags when targeting run-of-site.
- Self-serve is currently limited to sites that have a large impression volume, ie: Stack Overflow and Super User. We don't currently offer any advertising on many Stack Exchange sites, and SoftwareRecs is one of them, unfortunately.
- If you can share the interaction with our team with me, I'm happy to look into it and make steps to speak with the entire team to ensure we're doing everything we can to have your experience with us be a positive one. If you're so inclined, send an email to adops@stackoverflow.com or to reach me directly, steve@stackoverflow.com.
I've managed larger advertising campaigns which would easily meet your $5k/m minimum but agree with the GP that your ad structure is a non-starter for me.
Whenever I've looked at introducing a new advertising channel, I always start with a test run of a few hundred dollars to see if it's worth investing more. I'm not going to drop $5k on an ad without knowing if I'll get any results at all.
It seems like you only offer two options for someone like me:
1. Run a test campaign without targeting and therefore get suboptimal results. This likely just lost you the sale of a bigger campaign (where I might get good results with targeting).
2. Risk spending $5,000 on a channel which doesn't give effective results. This isn't a risk I'd usually be willing to take.
Maybe you're targeting brands who are big enough to experiment with $5k buys or who don't test channels. Either way, I'm really not sure what the value prop is on the self-serve option.
Sounds like "if you're not spending the minimum then we don't want you ... unless you're a business that spend much more"? Surely the only businesses that would advertise without tag or geolocation specifying would be massive brands?
Are you shy about mentioning that you only want large advertisers; it's not possible you don't realise the ordering only makes sense for such companies, is it?
Geo-targeting is a must unless one's trying to build a "brand awareness" and need to spray everyone in sight.
In particular, in a context of trying to actually sell some professional/work software it's a norm and a common sense to target North America and Western Europe first and foremost. Conversely, and putting it bluntly, serving such ads to India is like feeding money into a shredder. So geo-targeting is absolutely essential.
We looked at advertising with them about a year ago and their options and response were both underwhelming. It wasn't possible to geo-target, it wasn't possible to advertise on most relevant sites (e.g. SoftwareRecs), and their upfront budget requirements weren't compatible with how we normally do things, which is to run a small test campaign to see what sort of traffic an outlet can drive and then expand if it goes well. On top of that, the response from their sales reps was curt and the last message in conversation, once it was clear that we aren't going to drop 50K, remained plain unanswered. So, YMMV.