Blaze disappoints – advertising on abandoned blogs

Hi there, @rayela,

Thanks for sharing your experience with Blaze advertising. From your message, it seems you’re facing issues with the quality of placements and are not satisfied with the traffic from the ads.

We value your feedback about advertising on inactive blogs and the lack of traffic from Tumblr. Improvements to Blaze’s algorithm to exclude inactive blogs would indeed benefit advertisers looking for quality engagement. I have flagged your message to the correct product team.

In the meantime, if there’s anything else we can do as Jetpack team, do let us know.

We appreciate your input, as it helps us to continually improve our services!

Thank you for responding!? Today I even got a hit from a blogger who has been dead for four years….? And, my first hit from tumblr.? Yes, it really is not worth it and I’m surprised that you haven’t gotten more complaints from other advertisers.

Hey @rayela,

I hear you, thanks for sharing that with us. Actually we haven’t received many feedback like yours, but this doesn’t mean that your voice won’t be heard ??

If there’s anything else we can do, let us know. Otherwise I think I can mark the thread as solved.

Sorry, but I have more questions about Blaze.

The promotion ended. I did two and both were for a week with a budget of $35. Neither one used up more than $5 of what I had budgeted. Why? Look at the difference of projected impressions with what actually was done. It doesn’t make sense? It makes me wonder if you even have many people using Blaze…. If other people aren’t complaining, they probably are not checking the links that show up in the stats. Seriously, almost every one that I checked had been abandoned by more than 4 years and there was even one that had a dead author.

Why didn’t you use the whole amount that I had budgeted? I’m just confused about how this is supposed to be a good investment…. I wanted to support WordPress over Facebook, but this is so backward that it has no logic….

Hi @rayela, I understand your concern regarding the underutilization of your budget and the quality of impressions provided by the Blaze service.

Your budget’s lower-than-anticipated spending might be related to the availability and performance of your selected ads and the matching of audience preferences. I am wondering if you selected a different audience (language/ location/ interests) or the same audience for both campaigns. I’d recommend trying another campaign with a different audience to see how it impacts your campaign.

I don’t think that’s the problem. As you can see, there were almost 20,000 impressions between the two and only 52 clicks. If all of those impressions landed on dead blogs, it’s logical that they are not going to get seen. And, why did they only spend $5 out of the $70 I had allocated to the campaigns? I’m glad they didn’t keep going as they are obviously going to places where they won’t be seen, but it’s just very strange. I have never seen such a bad advertising program. Is there a place where you have documented happy Blaze users? And, how many users are repeat advertisers?

Hello there, Sebastian from Jetpack here. I hope you are doing well.

I understand your frustration with the performance of your advertising campaign. Let me clarify a few points that might address your concerns.

Firstly, ads on the Blaze platform are only served when a visitor is on the page. For an impression (view) to register, the ad must be visible on the visitor’s screen. This means that the ad is not just sitting on an inactive or “dead” blog waiting for a visitor. Instead, ad requests are made in real-time as visitors load the pages.

Regarding the specific targeting of your campaign, it’s possible that the niche you chose—woodworking sites with users from the US—is too specific. This can limit the number of available impressions and clicks. If the target audience is very narrow, there might not be enough traffic to fully utilize your budget, which could explain why only $5 out of the $70 was spent.

To address your concern about ad performance and where your ads are being displayed, Blaze offers some transparency. Users can typically see reports on the sites where their ads have appeared. This can help you understand better where your ads are being placed and whether those placements align with your expectations.

In this case, it’s possible that your targeting may be too narrow, limiting ad delivery. To optimize your campaign better, consider broadening your target audience slightly or reviewing the placements through Blaze’s reporting tools.

I hope this helps; please let us know if you have any doubts.