In the process of trying to attract new business to Your Right Website, I have turned to advertising online using various ad platforms, both those provided by big tech platforms like Google and Facebook and those run by conservative tech and alt-tech like Gab and Rumble. This article will provide an overview and review of my experience using these platforms, as well as my thoughts on advertising using these platforms as a new business.
This article is written through the lens of trying to launch a business online that caters to small business owners and conservatives. It is my hope that through this article some insight into advertising online and the offerings provided by conservative tech in the advertising space can be gained by the reader.
If you want to jump to a specific ad network to see my review and thoughts, you can click on that ad network from the list below:
Gab Ads
Minimum Deposit: $20.00
My first stop on my advertising journey was Gab Ads. I figured that it advertising on Gab would be a great place to find conservative clients for my conservative web design business. I found Gab’s interface easy to use and the process of adding an ad via Gab was straightforward. Gab offers several different types of ads, including a social feed ad, social sidebar ad and an ad that is designed to get you new followers. For my business, I used the social feed ad type, which would send users to my website.
Unfortunately, the options for targeting users based on interests and demographics provided by Gab Ads are very limited. Gab allows you to target users based on three categories: Country, State and Interests. Targeting is one or the other, so there is not a way to target based on interest and country.
When targeting by interest, you have the ability to choose a very broad interest category, such as News, Faith or Business. Unfortunately, you cannot target more in depth than this and what the categories are using to target users is not made clear. Is this targeting based on the user’s posts? The groups they are a member of? The posts they like? This was not made clear. At least you could select three categories to target, but again it was not made clear if the user must match all three or if it is the user must match one of the three.
When I started running ads via Gab, I did start to get traffic but the traffic that I was receiving usually bounced after a single visit to my site. I could see via the Matomo Analytics on this site that users would come from Gab, land on the site and then bounce right away. I guess this is to be expected as the ads served by Gab are not targeted at all, so I’m sure there was quite a few lookie-loos who either clicked the ad because they were curious or because they clicked on accident.
Overall, Gab Ads is probably good for a product with mass-market or broad Conservative appeal, but is not very good for something where precise targeting is necessary and you’ll probably end up wasting a lot of money on clicks that have no potential to convert if you’re offering something specialized like web design services.
My recommendation to Andrew Torba and the Gab team would be to improve the ad targeting and consider asking users at signup what their interests are, similar to how X and Reddit do. This data can be used to better target advertisements to users.
Google Ads
Minimum Deposit: $10.00
Having tried Gab Ads without much success, the next stop on my advertising journey was Google Ads. With a minimum deposit of $10.00, it was affordable to get started with creating an ad on Google. However, the interface for Google Ads is in my opinion overly complicated and the hardest to use of the different platforms reviewed in this article.
Unlike the other platforms mentioned here, Google doesn’t let you just upload an ad image and text, instead Google breaks things up into different pieces that Google can swap together to build an ad. So, you might have three different headlines, four different sentences and any number of supporting links and other assets that get swapped together into an ad that Google thinks will convert for a given user. This made setting up the ads rather tricky but also contributed to me getting probably the highest quality traffic out of any of the advertising platforms mentioned here.
When setting up your campaign with Google, you have to set a conversion action. When I first created my campaign, I had a conversion action of “view a page” set, which should have triggered when a user viewed the confirmation page for my free consultation sign up. Users would click a button on the website to schedule a free consultation, then be taken over to Calendly to fill out a booking form and then would be sent back to this website to view a confirmation page. However, this flow apparently confused Google’s ad algorithm.
It turns out that Google could not track users when they left the site and came back, so Google was never seeing conversions. This resulted in my ads running for a few days in the beginning as Google’s ads were in learning mode, but then all ad impressions stopped since Google was not seeing any conversions.
It took having a meeting with Google for them to come up with a workaround. Google ended up providing me with a Javascript code to track the action of someone clicking the “Book a Free Consultation” button as a conversion. This was good as it could be tracked, but bad because I didn’t really want to know when someone opened the consultation form but rather when someone completed it.
Even after this, however, I had a heck of a time getting Google to actually run my ads. It took having another conversation or two with Google’s support to adjust some settings in my campaign and finally get my ads running. I believe the issue was something about the goal I wanted to achieve with the ads, but since this was a while ago I can’t fully remember. However, I believe Google required me to change the goal of the campaign from conversions to clicks in order to get more traffic, which doesn’t really make sense as my goal is conversions. I did, however, eventually start getting traffic.
The traffic from Google seemed to be a better quality than that from Gab. Some users would arrive on the site and I could see them browsing and going from page to page and actually studying the site. Some even clicked the free consultation button. However, oddly, none of the users who clicked the button for a free consultation actually filled out the free consultation form. Towards the end of my campaign, I started to suspect that at least some of the traffic may have been from bots, simply because they never filled out the free consultation form and because sometimes users would take a really weird path through the site. For instance, a user might land on the homepage, view the privacy policy and then click on the free consultation button. This didn’t seem like real traffic.
Within Google Ads there is also a setting to determine where traffic comes from. By default, Google will send you traffic from Google Search and their partner websites, which is really any website that has a Google Adsense banner on their pages. This initially led to me getting garbage traffic from sites like funcasino.com and games4kids.com (names fake, but illustrate the type of sites) that clearly were not being used by someone who might purchase my services. Luckily, however, I was able to turn this setting off and ensure I was only receiving traffic from Google Search.
Overall, Google’s advertising option is the most complicated of the bunch and while there was some traffic that seemed to be legitimate, I suspect there may also have been some bot traffic draining my budget. I will say, however, their customer support was decent and they would reach out via phone and email to offer support as well as meet via Google Meet to help resolve my issues.
Facebook Ads
Minimum Deposit: $0.00
After trying Google for advertising, I figured I would try Facebook’s advertising options. Although I lothe Facebook as a company, I wanted to see if their advertising worked any better than Gab and Google. It was easy to set up an ad using Facebook’s Ad Manager and there was no upfront deposit required. Instead, Facebook will bill you in progressively larger amounts as you build trust on the system. So, for the first day I had several $2.00 transactions on my debit card, then several $3.00 transactions and this increased more and more until they were floating me around $10.00 per transaction.
Facebook’s ad targeting was leaps and bounds above what Gab offered, although it still wasn’t as advanced as I would have liked. I was able to target based on interests, demographics, income level and page status. For instance, I could target new small business owners of less than six months, people who view business Facebook groups and people who are in the upper 20% of income levels.
This ability to target did result in getting some legitimate looking traffic to my website, but it was really hampered because I could not target based on political affiliation. I would have loved to be able to only target conservatives with these ads, but Facebook prohibits targeting based on political affiliation in their advertising.
I also faced censorship when using Facebook. One of the ways you can advertise with Facebook is by creating a post on your business page and then boosting that post via an ad. I had tried to boost a post about our easy to use WordPress blocks, however every time I would post a link to that page on my own business page, Facebook would automatically take it down within a minute or two, before I could boost it. Facebook did give me the ability to request a review of their actions, but after a couple of weeks I had never heard anything from Facebook regarding the status of that review.
This isn’t the first time Facebook censored me. Previously, Facebook prevented my personal account from following the account for Darren Bailey, a former Republican candidate for Illinois Governor and current candidate for US Congress.
Facebook’s aggressive censorship makes recommending them as a platform for advertising hard. While the traffic you can receive from Facebook Ads may be good depending on what you are selling, whether you will be allowed to sell it will be arbitrarily left up to their bots and manual reviewers in countries like India and the Philippines.
Truth Social (via Rumble Ads)
Minimum Deposit: $100.00
Having tried Gab, Google and Facebook, I figured I would try advertising on Truth Social. However, Truth Social doesn’t make how to advertise on their site easy to ascertain. After contacting Truth Social, they informed me that you have to advertise via the Rumble Ads platform.
Rumble requires a $100.00 deposit upfront, which is the most expensive deposit of the bunch. In order to advertise on Truth Social, you have to go into your settings and generate an advertiser token string, which then has to be pasted into the ads you create inside of Rumble Ads. This process was cumbersome and not intuitive.
After creating my ads via Rumble, I started my ad campaign and did not receive any impressions. This was because while Rumble allows you to target your ads based on any keywords you specify, Truth Social can’t use those keywords to target ads on their platform. So, your ads never run.
When I removed the keywords, I found my ads started to spend really, really quickly, with me burning through about $8.00 in about 15 minutes. After pausing the campaign, I saw that my spend kept increasing. This continued for about 15 minutes after I had hit pause on my campaign. Contacting Rumble Ads Support, they confirmed there can be a bit of a delay, which is pretty concerning.
They also sent me to a FAQ on how to slow the ad spend. This helped, but led to me discovering another issue. With the slower spend, I was getting traffic but it was bouncing after a single page view, similar to what I saw with Gab. I noticed that the traffic was all via mobile devices.
I figured I would then simply target only desktop operating systems like Windows and Mac, which Rumble Ads allows you to set as a targeting parameter inside of their dashboard. However, choosing to target only desktop operating systems lead to my ads not running anymore. So, it seems that with Rumble via Truth Social you can only target mobile traffic and it’s possible you might not even see any desktop traffic on your ads at all.
I’m currently experimenting with Rumble Ads and will likely see if with my $100.00 deposit if I get any results, but so far the traffic coming from Rumble / Truth Social seems pretty bad, likely because it’s not targeted.
Honorable Mentions
Honorable mentions include LinkedIn Ads and NextDoor Ads. LinkedIn had initial deposits that were too high for my tastes and the number of clicks they boasted about for boosting a post seemed low compared to the other options, so I didn’t end up taking a chance.
NextDoor actually has two ad programs, one for people who want to advertise nationally and another for those who want to advertise locally. However, to advertise locally you have to provide a local business address, which for a home based business is not something I wanted to do. Oddly, if you do provide an address you can then target users in a different area via city or zip code, so their system is a bit weird. They wanted too high of a deposit though so I didn’t end up trying NextDoor Ads.
Lessons Learned
Overall, the main takeaway is that advertising online is pretty terrible. After spending a few hundred dollars on online ads via four online ad platforms I have yet to receive a single solid lead via these platforms. Maybe it’s just me, or maybe online advertising just sucks these days. Maybe most users are just using ad blockers or otherwise tuning out the ads?
Anyway, I’ll continue to write good content and network both online and in person and try and build my business. If you need website design then get in touch.
Until next time.
~ Brandon