First reinvestment experiment - sponsored ads

I wanted 2023 to be the year where I start reinvesting profits back to product. I wrote about my intentions to do so, and then brainstormed some ideas. And now my first experiment! Sponsoring ads in newsletters/sites by other indies makers and creators to get more distribution for my Plugins For Carrd project.

Just bought my very first sponsorship ad – a $20/month ad in @JannisBetschki’s Tools For Creators website. Since July 2022, Tools for Creators averages around 1,500 pageviews and 350 unique visitors per month, so I’m hoping that would translate to some click-throughs! 🤞

Some criteria I considered when buying this ad:

• a newsletter/tool by a fellow indie maker or creator
• he builds for Carrd or uses it often
• his audience is directly related to Carrd, or strongly adjacent (e.g. nocode)
• motivated and marketing the site a lot
• semi decent monthly traffic (TBH I have no idea what a baseline looks like…)

To better track the click-throughs, I added a ref URL parameter to the plugins.carrd.co/?ref=toolsforcreators so that it’ll show up as a separate source on my Google Analytics dashboard. But one thing I would love to track is conversion. How many click-throughs from the site actually resulted in paid customers? That’s the ultimate metric, but unsure yet how to measure it (or if it’s even possible)…

Next ad I’m eyeing: the $19/month sponsorhsip ad on Mark Bowley’s Deck Of Carrd website which averages 400+ visits per month and average time on site ~5min.

What else should I look out for or measure when it comes to getting the most out of an sponsorship ad?