I Tried Blaze So You Wouldn’t Have To
I am sure you most of you have read about Blaze. For those that haven’t, Blaze is a feature that was released a while ago on WordPress. It’s an advertising feature that helps bloggers push their content to a larger audience. Many bloggers have mixed feelings about this feature and I did too. So, when I was given a $50 credit to use on Blaze for participating in a meeting with WordPress, I decided to put it to use. I tried Blaze so you wouldn’t have to and decided to share my results so that you can know if it’s a feature worth using or not.
Here’s What Happened
Overall, I was very unimpressed with the results. They were anticlimactic to say the least. What I was focused on is seeing if Blaze would increase my views, likes and comments. This is the post I shared and these are the results I got:
Impressions Vs Views
The first thing I noticed was the difference in how many impressions the post got versus how many views I actually got both organically and through the Ad. The main point of using services such as Blaze is to increase your views (not impressions) as well as your click-through rate because at the end of the day you want to get them on your blog. That’s why you’re using this service. Impressions means that people saw your post on their Reader but did not click on it to read it. Clicks are the number of people that actually clicked on the post and read it.
Now, as you can tell from the above stats, I got a lot of impressions but barely any views. And that was a big disappointment because as I said the primary goal of using an Ads feature would be to acquire more views.
The Audience
You may be wondering why I got so many impressions but not as many views? Well, I think Blaze isn’t great at finding the right audience for your content. Yes, you can pick which audience to push the post towards. However, WordPress should be pushing it to people who follow the tags you used on your post or have shown prior interest to content similar to your post. That’s what most platforms do with Ads and that’s why they are successful. I think this is something WP needs to manually work on instead of leaving it up to AI which is what is currently happening. AI recommends to you the audience, interests and location.
Is It Worth It?
I tried Blaze so you wouldn’t have to because I wanted to know if it was worth it. So, is it worth it? Right now, it’s going to be a no from me. Impressions are worth nothing if the click-through rates are so low. I got more views organically in that period of time than I did through Ads simply by using good SEO tactics for the post which by the way is free. If WordPress did improve Blaze at some point in the future improving the click-through rates then I would rethink my opinion. But for now, I don’t think it’s worth it.
Something that also sticks in my craw is that I already pay WordPress for my plan so shouldn’t they be pushing the content anyway? To me, it’s not fair that bloggers have to pay extra for their content to be seen. A few years back you could get thousands of monthly views and hundreds of followers in a month. And now, you have to work extra hard to even retain the measly amount of views you get. Suspiciously, the views went down for many bloggers right around the time Blaze was introduced…
So, I’ll be giving Blaze a big no for now.
What are your thoughts on Blaze? Have you ever tried using it? Did it yield positive results? Let me know in the comments below because I would love to hear your thoughts. Or simply stop by and say hi!
Instead of using Blaze, why not use my blogging advice by clicking here. It’s free and yields results!
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