Paid advertising is most effective at the very early stage, while no one knows about your community yet. Here is how it works:
- When no one knows about your community, advertising about it can be shown to everyone from the target audience and those who are interested will use the advertising. The costs will be the minimum.
- When some people already know about the community, in order to get the same number of users going through the advertising as before you will need to show more advertising or do it in a more targeted way. So the costs get higher.
- At some point, most people in the target audience will know about the community and will not go through the advertising and even if they do, they will be returned users but not new ones. This is the moment when the costs of getting new users by advertising becomes unreasonably high.
For the same reasons, advertising becomes more expensive as the amount of traffic you plan to send to your community through advertising channels increases.
The key advantage of using advertising is its flexibility. With advertising we can target users of a particular type when we need some specific content depending on the current balance of user interests.
Please note that it is almost impossible to justify advertising expenses from the business perspective. The value that an average user brings is very close to zero whereas the spendings are quite tangible. Here one needs to understand that we advertise a community because other channels of new users are either even more expensive or aren’t yet working. As soon as search engines start sending you people who create an account and post something on the platform, you can shut down advertising. If you have a more efficient way to attain new users than advertising, use it.
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.