Earlier this year, WordPress introduced Blaze — a new way to ignite your growth on WordPress.com. They promise to run ads across millions of sites on WordPress.com and Tumblr. Is it worth the cost? I decided to give it a spin to find out.
I ran two ads to potentially send visitors to two of my most popular posts of the last 6 months. I intentionally picked topics that should have some appeal to a broader audience. Here are the two ads and the cost for both over a 4 day period:
Ad #1 – Henry Cavill’s List of 50 Tips for Life
You can see in the settings above, that I had set a budget of $70 ($10/day) to run for 7 days. This generated a meager 119 clicks, at a cost of nearly $0.40 per click. I’m not selling anything, so as a personal blog owner, this was pretty steep in terms of cost.
Ad #2 – Free Excel Checkbook Register Template
This was another popular post that offered something free, namely an Excel template for managing a checkbook or savings account. Over the course of 4 days, I ran up a cost of $45 which garnered an even smaller number of clicks (61). That comes out to $0.74 per click for something I was giving away for free. Ouch.
You can see why I abandoned both ads after just 4 days.
My blog doesn’t get a lot of traffic, and that’s okay. I’m not trying to sell anything. I simply started this blog some ten years ago as an outlet for my journey with the Christian faith.
You can see in the graph below when I started the Blaze advertising campaigns, which resulted in just a modest uptick in traffic.
For me personally, this was an interesting experiment but clearly, it wasn’t even remotely worthwhile. YMMV and perhaps if you’re selling items on your blog, it might be worth it. Supposedly, the average cost per click for Google Ads is between $1 and $2, so WordPress Blaze could be a cheaper option. But this was my experience with WordPress Blaze, and I concluded it’s not worth it from a cost perspective.