Some time ago I read an article by Eric Sink regarding magazine advertising for small ISV’s.

Despite the excellent advise in this article, I forgot it for a time when Screen Mimic 1.0 was released and took
out a 1/4 page ad in a magazine. Later on I thought “This was probably not the smartest thing I could have done.” Around the same time I also started a
Google adwords campaign.

After a couple of months, I realized that having both of these campaigns running was putting me way over on my advertising budget. So, I decided to cut one of the campaigns. Since I didn’t have a real way of tracking where sales were coming from, I had to pick one to cut.

There were two side effects to this.

• The bad news: Sales dropped.
• The good news: I now know where sales were coming from.

This graph show sales revenue compared with advertising in Google vs advertising in a Macintosh-centric magazine:

There is a direct correspondence between dollars spent on Google adwords and revenue received. While I won’t give out the exact sales figures, I can tell you that for every 1 dollar spent on advertising, we received 3 dollars in revenue. Since the rest of our overhead is low, I consider this to be a very acceptable ROI.

Based on the graph, it’s hard to say whether the magazine advertising had any effect on sales. It could be that without the magazine advertising that the overall sales would have been much lower, but the direct correlation between adwords spending on Google, and sales revenue received is very interesting.