Advertise Your Content With Blaze

Advertise your content across WordPress.com and Tumblr from as little as $5 per day. This guide will show you how to attract high-quality traffic to your website using Blaze.

Create a Blaze campaign to advertise a post or page on some of the millions of pages across WordPress.com and Tumblr. Follow these steps to set up your Blaze campaign:

1. From your site’s dashboard, visit Tools → Advertising to view a list of your site’s posts and pages:

2. Locate the page or post you want to promote.
   • At the top of the list, you can search by title, filter to only show posts or only pages, and sort your content by different criteria like recently updated or most viewed.
3. Click the “Promote“ button to start creating your ad campaign.
4. Choose a campaign objective from traffic, sales, awareness, and engagement.
5. To continue with the default campaign created, click the “Submit campaign” button. To make edits to appearance, audience, budget, duration, or payment, click the “Make changes” button.

Learn more about each section of your ad campaign in the sections below:

The “Appearance” section asks for three pieces of information to determine how your ad will look:

• Ad creative: Upload an image to represent your page or post. You can use the crop tool to adjust your image’s appearance in the ad.
  • There is no recommended image size because the image’s appearance changes based on where the ad appears. We recommend using a picture containing no words because the image may be cropped as it adapts to different devices. Use the ad preview on the right side as a guide.
• Title: This appears above your image as bolded text. You can write a maximum of 80 characters here. Use them wisely to capture the viewer’s attention.
• Snippet: A short text description that appears underneath your image. You can write a maximum of 160 characters here. We recommend using this text to support your headline and give viewers more context about what they will see when they click the ad and arrive at your content.

For the “Audience” section, you can choose who will see your ad by selecting from the following dropdowns:

• Language: Choose from 15 languages your content appeals to. You can select multiple languages here.
• Interests: Choose the interests of your intended audience. Select “All topics“ to show your post to all potential viewers regardless of their interests. You can select multiple interests here.
• Location: Choose geographic areas where your campaign will be displayed. You can narrow down your audience by entering your desired location(s). You can type countries, states, and cities or leave the field blank to show your post to all potential viewers, regardless of location.

As you adjust your settings on this screen, your ad summary will reflect your choices and provide you with estimated impressions for your campaign, which is the number of times your ad will be shown.

In the “Budget and duration” section, you can control how much you would like to spend on your campaign:

• Schedule: Choose to run the ad until you decide to stop it, or specify the number of days between 1 and 28 days.
• Start date: Select when you would like your campaign to start running.
• Total: Drag the slider up or down to choose your spend. USD is the only currency supported at this time.

Estimated Impressions

In advertising, an “impression” refers to each time your ad is displayed to visitors on a given webpage. As you adjust your budget and targeting choices, you will see an estimate of how many people you will reach with your ad. This is shown in the Estimated impressions section on the right side of the “Budget and duration” section of the ad campaign editor.

Campaigns are paid on a cost-per-thousand (CPM) basis. CPM is an acronym for cost per mille (mille is a Latin/French word for thousand). This means your campaign will be charged for every 1,000 times your ad is displayed.

However, it’s worth understanding that these impressions do not guarantee visitors will click on your ad. As with most forms of marketing, the best results will depend on capturing your target audience’s interest in the moment. Take care to craft an ad that resonates with the audience you are trying to reach.

It’s important to balance your reach with how relevant your content is to your audience. This will help maximize the number of clicks your ad receives and, ultimately, how much traffic the ad produces for your site. If you’re unsure what to select for your budget, we suggest starting at $5 per day over 7 days, then growing from there based on your results.

Max Budget

The “Max Budget” section on the right sidebar displays your maximum budget based on your chosen daily budget and duration.

Setting a budget of $5 per day, for 7 days, does not mean your campaign will cost $35. Instead, the budget sets a maximum cost that you’ll spend for your particular campaign based on your estimated impressions. The actual spending may be less than your budget as it depend on the number of impressions that were actually served rather than the initial estimate.

Under Advanced Settings, you will find the following options:

• Targeted Devices: Choose if you want your post to be seen by viewers on desktop computers or mobile devices. Select “All devices” to show your post to all potential viewers regardless of their device.
• Destination URL: Choose where the viewer arrives upon clicking the ad: either to the original post or page you selected, or to your website’s homepage.
• URL parameters: Add URL parameters for tracking and analytics.

In the Payment section, fill out your card details and click the “Submit campaign” button. You won’t be charged until after the ad has been approved and starts running on our network of sites.

Payments will be made automatically weekly, based on delivered impressions over that period (i.e., how many times your ad was served). You will be charged weekly for ads served across all of your promotions. If your account exceeds the maximum allowed outstanding balance before the one-week billing cycle, your card may be charged earlier. Limits are dynamic and depend on your total paid amount and other risk factors.

If you have Blaze Credits, they will always be used first before charging your card.

When a payment is made, you will receive an email receipt to the email address associated with your WordPress.com account.

If a payment fails, we may suspend all active ads and deny the start of new ones until the debt is settled. You will be notified by email with payment links to resolve the outstanding balance.

You can cancel your campaigns at any time. You will only be charged for the portion of your campaign that has already been served up until that point. It is not possible to refund any charges for ads that have already been displayed, so make sure to set your budget to an amount you are willing to pay.

You can remove a credit card from Blaze in the Payment Methods section of your WordPress.com account. For further assistance with Blaze payments, contact support.

We review all Blaze campaigns for compliance with our Advertising Policy before others see them.

To ensure your ad is approved, please also ensure that:

1. You have added a domain to your site.
2. Your website is publicly accessible.

We try to moderate ads as soon as possible, but ads take at least 24 hours to be reviewed. This timeline may change depending on how much content we need to review.

If your post has been approved, you will receive an email saying that your post was approved and will be put online.

Your post will be rejected if it does not conform to our Advertising Policy. You will not be charged if your post is rejected.

From your site’s dashboard, visit Tools → Advertising and click on the “Campaigns” tab to access your running campaigns. You will see the details of your live ads and any ads awaiting moderation.

Click on any campaign to view information including:

• Impressions, clicks, and the click-through rate on your ad.
• The duration and budget you set for that ad, including how much has been spent so far and how much money is left on your budget.
• A comparison of how much traffic was driven by the ad compared to organic traffic to the page that did not come from the ad.

If you need to edit any aspect of a campaign that’s already submitted, including the campaign title, snippet, audience, budget, or duration, you will cancel the existing campaign and create a new campaign with the necessary updates.

In order to edit a campaign that is already submitted, follow these steps:

1. First, you’ll stop the current Ad Campaign.
2. From your site’s dashboard, go to Tools → Advertising and click on the “Campaigns” tab.
3. Click on the campaign you’d like to stop.
4. Click on the “Stop campaign” link.
   • The campaign will stop within five minutes, and you will only be charged for the portion of your campaign that has already been served up until that point.
5. Next, you’ll create a new compaign.
6. From your site’s dashboard, visit Tools → Advertising to view a list of your site’s posts and pages.
7. Locate the page or post you want to promote.
8. Click the “Promote“ button to start creating your ad campaign.
9. To continue with the default campaign created, click the “Submit campaign” button. To make edits to appearance, audience, budget, duration, or payment, click the “Make changes” button.

You can review the details of each of the campaign settings in the Promote a Page or Post section of this guide.

Your new ad will go through the default ad approval process before going live.

If you wish to stop a campaign, follow the steps below:

1. From your site’s dashboard, go to Tools → Advertising and click on the “Campaigns” tab.
2. Click on the campaign you’d like to stop.
3. Click on the “Stop campaign” link.

Once a campaign has been canceled, it will stop running, with no option to restart.

If you need to edit a campaign that’s already submitted, you must cancel that campaign and create a new one with the necessary updates, then submit that for approval.

Your ad campaign will appear across the network of Tumblr and free WordPress.com sites with an ‘Advertisement’ label.

For more information, please review our Advertising Policy and Terms of Service.

With Blaze, your budget goes towards a set number of impressions. An impression happens each time your ad is shown to someone.

Other ad platforms use a “cost per click” basis, where you pay every time someone clicks, but you don’t always have as much control over how often or how broadly your ad is shown.

Blaze uses a simpler, sure-fire model in which you simply pay to show your ad, and you won’t pay more if more people decide to click on your ad. 

While using Blaze, you will encounter some words and abbreviations that are specific to advertising. Here is a quick guide to familiarize yourself with some of the most commonly used terms:

• Impressions
  • In general, an impression happens every time your ad appears on someone’s screen. There are technical aspects to exactly when an impression is counted, but the basic idea is that an actual person sees your entire ad on their screen. 
• Clicks
  • A click is what it sounds like – it happens when your ad is clicked on. The definition of a click can get tricky if there are “bots” on a website that click on ads, or if a person immediately leaves your website after clicking on your ad.
    
    After all, you don’t just want a “click”, you want an actual person browsing your site. This is one reason that we use the simpler impression-based model for Blaze; it avoids charging you for clicks that are unwanted or not useful. 
• Reach
  • Reach is how many people saw your ad. This is related to impressions, but it’s a measure of how many people saw your ad, not how many times your ad was viewed. If 5 people saw your ad 5 times each, the reach is 5 and the number of impressions is 25.
    
    Sometimes the word reach is used as the number of people that could potentially view your ad. So if your campaign targets everyone in a state with a population of 5,000,000, that would be the “reach” in that usage.
    
• Frequency
  • Frequency means how many times the average person saw your ad, among people who saw the ad at least once. So if you have a campaign with 1000 impressions and a reach of 500 people that saw the ad, the frequency is 2. 

• Audience size
  • Audience size generally refers to how many people are eligible to see your ad, depending on your campaign settings. This is an estimated maximum number of people that could see your ad, but depending on budget and schedule, the number of people who actually see the ad is usually lower. 

• CPM – Cost Per Mille
  • CPM is the abbreviation for Cost Per Mille, which means “cost per thousand”. CPM is how much you are charged for 1000 impressions.
    
• CPC – Cost Per Click
  • Cost per click is what it sounds like – the amount you are charged when someone clicks on your ads. On other platforms, CPC can vary widely, often several dollars per click or more, depending on competition for clicks in a given category.
    
• CPA – Cost Per Acquisition / Action
  • Some platforms offer CPA bidding, which is an amount you are charged for a certain ‘acquisition’, ‘action’, or conversion. This often refers to making a sale or getting a lead. CPA bidding typically relies on black-box optimization and tends to be expensive, but can work in the right circumstances. 

• CTA – Call To Action
  • CTA is a common term in the digital advertising and marketing world. It is any time that you directly express the action you want your audience to take. “Learn More”, “Get Started” and  “Add to Cart” are all common “calls to action” or CTAs. Ads and the pages they lead to typically focus on a single CTA to avoid distracting viewers.  

Getting results from Blaze ads works the same as it does on any advertising platform: Show the right ad, to the right person, at the right time, people will respond, and you’ll get the results you want. In a world with countless distractions competing with your ad, this is easier said than done, but you can improve your chances by starting with some best practices:

“Ad creative” refers to the combination of image, text, video and/or audio that make up your ad. The “right ad” is one that combines an attractive image and effective text to get your intended audience interested enough to click and engage with your content.

Don’t worry if you’re not a professional writer or designer. You can use the AI helper in Blaze to generate ideas for your ad’s text. Feel free to try a few versions of the text, or just use it for inspiration.

An image is often the most important part of the ad. A good image for an ad is

• Eye-catching
• High-resolution
• Not blurry or pixelated
• Free of excessive text
• Easy to understand right away 
• Makes sense in many contexts 

It should also give your audience a clear, accurate idea of what they’re going to find when they click.

The quality of your image can make or break the performance of your ad. If you can, it’s a good idea to take time to create and/or edit images specifically for your ads. 

The image should attract your audience’s attention, the text conveys key information. You should use as few words as are necessary. Be clear and direct, giving your audience a good reason to click.

Take some time to observe the ads of successful competitors in your space. How do they word their ads? How many words do they use? What key calls to action do they use like “Learn More”? Consider what makes your website unique, and emphasize that in your text.

Here are some examples :

Not enough text: Hot Dogs.

Too much text: Our family farms supply us with all-natural beef that we use in our delicious, all-beef, all-natural Hot Dogs that are available in grocery stores starting at $3.99.

Just right: Delicious, All-Natural, All-Beef Hot Dogs – $3.99

Blaze offers targeting features so you can show your ads to your ideal audience. When you are creating images and text for your ad, take a moment to consider the fit between your audience and the ad itself.

Avoid mismatches in language / translation, interests, or geography. If you are showing ads in Spain, you should probably use Spanish text. If you are showing ads to people who are interested in dogs, you should probably not have only cats in the image – etc. 

If someone clicks your ad and doesn’t find what they expected on your website, this creates a poor experience for them, and poor results for you. 

Make sure that your ad sets realistic expectations for your website, don’t imply users will find something else when they click.

Most advertisers will want to use at least some targeting features to narrow the audience for your ads. The goal is to show your ad only to people who are interested.

Making use of targeting features to show your ad to more interested people, and fewer uninterested people, is critical. This is the main way you can control your spend and improve ROI. Unless your ad is equally relevant to everyone that might see it, it’s a good idea to review targeting options while creating your campaign.

Select one or more locations to limit your ad to people in the areas where your website is most relevant. For example, if you have a business that only ships to certain countries, make sure to select them during campaign creation.

You can use language targeting in a similar way. If your readers or customers generally prefer to read English, make sure to use that targeting option.

Using interest targeting to narrow your audience is a great way to get more return on investment. When an interest directly matches the content of your website, this is straightforward. For example, a Gardening Tips blog will naturally want target Gardening as an interest.

What if your website doesn’t have an obvious connection to one of the interests available for targeting? In that case, spend some time thinking about your audience – what kind of people are they? What other interests tend to relate to your website? What interests would imply an interest in your website?

For example, there may not be a “BBQ” interest category, but “Cooking” or “Food and Wine” might be suitable.

Maybe you don’t yet know enough about your ideal audience to confidently select targeting options. Maybe you’d like to discover new groups of people that are interested in your website. Blaze is also great for learning about your audience.

To do this, set up multiple copies of the same ad, and in each campaign, change only the targeting settings. One ad might be targeted to people interested in Tennis, another to people interested in Golf, and so on.

After some time passes and each ad has received many impressions and clicks, you can compare how well each ad performed. This tells you which audiences responded to your ad best. So after a few days or weeks, you can use real-world data to find out if golfers or tennis players are a better audience for your website.

This leads us to our next topic – 

If you are familiar with marketing, then you’ve probably heard of  “A/B Testing”. The basic idea is to test two or more variations of something at the same time. In this case, two variations of an ad to find out which performs better in the market.

This concept is very important in advertising. When you’re showing an ad to thousands of people around the world, it is usually impossible to know in advance how they will react.

To solve this problem, advertisers often run several versions – sometimes dozens – of a campaign at the same time. Each one is different in a single aspect – image, text, or targeting options.

If you run variations of an ad for a while, often one will emerge as a clear winner. It may get a higher click-through rate, or the people that click may purchase or subscribe much more often. Simply swapping out an image can sometimes dramatically improve results.

Consider testing several variations of your ad. While this practice increases your spending in the short term, it should ultimately allow you to minimize spending and/or maximize your returns. 

Blaze can give you a high-level overview of how your ads are performing. If you’re looking for more detailed analysis on traffic from Blaze, you have various options.

Many analytics tools like Jetpack Stats or Google Analytics allow you to make use of UTMs for analysis. UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module and is simply a series of text-based tags appended to the end of the target URL for your ad. You can add UTMs to your ad using the “URL Parameters” option in Blaze. There are many tools around the web you can use to create properly formatted UTMs for your campaign.

The Analytics tool sees the UTM when someone clicks on the ad, and you can use it to analyze their behavior later on. 

It’s a good idea to use tools to analyze the traffic on your website to monitor your results. Jetpack and Google Analytics are very popular, but there are many options. If you’re looking to take your website traffic to the next level, this is where you should start to get a better understanding of it.

Maybe you’ve tried running campaigns with Blaze and the results aren’t what you hoped for. Don’t get discouraged – most new ad campaigns aren’t an immediate hit, regardless of platform. Troubleshoot your campaign systematically to find out what’s limiting performance, and you can steadily work your way to effective growth for your website. 

A straightforward way to improve performance is to experiment with different text and images. Performance improvements by changing your ad’s text and/or images will primarily show up in clickthrough rate.

Testing the same ad with different audiences is an important way to drive results. When you find an audience that is more interested in your ad or website, you may see improvements in impressions, clickthrough rate, engagement with your site, conversion, or other metrics. 

Sometimes you can get lots of traffic, but not as many subscriptions or sales as you expected. Consider whether you’ve sent people to the right place – could you try a different part of your website, or create a “landing page” designed specifically for people who clicked on your ad?

For merchants, the ideal advertising scenario is when someone clicks on your ad, then immediately makes a purchase. Unfortunately, it’s rarely that simple. If the people clicking on your ads aren’t taking the action you want, consider adding an intermediate step that’s easier for them to take – following your blog, signing up for a newsletter, or following your social media accounts are examples of intermediate conversions that can eventually turn them into a customer.