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Results From My Entrecard Ad Campaign
Last December I posted the results of an ad campaign I ran on Facebook. I should change the ran to running because the campaign is still going although I haven’t seen a visitor from the ad to my startup (not CN) in forever. Today I’d like to share the results of an ad campaign I ran on Entrecard, also for my startup.
I reported on the launch of Entrecard’s ad program back in March and figured I would take it for a spin. You can purchase advertising starting at $25 in either CPC or CPM format. You upload a banner sized in the typical blog format of 125×125. From there you select a category — I selected the business category. There’s no targeting past the category selection. The ad went live about 24 hours later.
I’ve posted the results chart below directly from the Entrecard site. Here are the stats for my $25 ad purchase purchased under the 30 cents CPM option:
- 87982 impressions
- 550 clicks
- 0.0063 clickthru rate
- total orders = 0
The campaign resulted in zero total orders – I can use this metric because my startup charges a fee and isn’t based on pageviews like a blog might be. The interesting part that’s not computed at this point is how many of the 550 visitors have I at least opened the door to — meaning they will come back and order at a later date or share my service with someone else who will.
During the campaign Entrecard raised their baseline ad prices – doubling the CPM price from 30 cents to 60 cents. What’s interesting is that they doubled my balance at the time of the price change – a very classy move – so for this campaign the price increase didn’t affect the overall stats.
From my perspective, Entrecard ads seem very similar to buying ads on StumbleUpon using their Sponsored Stumbles program. Entrecard ads are less expensive than Sponsored Stumbles although the StumbleUpon program can lead to additional unpaid traffic via users who hit the "thumbs up" button on the StumbleUpon toolbar.
Of course note that with any ad program there are many factors to consider. My service is a completely paid service – perhaps a free service would work better for the Entrecard publishers and visitors. My suggestion with any ad network you are considering using is to run a small test similar to the one in this example. This gives you a chance to see if the publisher traffic is a good match for your product or service.
I had the same experience when I tested Facebook. Just a few basic Amazon links for people with certain keywords in their profile. E.g. Firefly would trigger a link to an Amazon referral for the Firefly boxed set. Or Sex and the City would trigger an Amazon link to the Blu-ray boxed set.
Zero conversions. Not one. Same for non-Amazon affiliate marketing stuff.
Facebook advertising is useless. Hundreds of clicks, zero conversions. Why bother?
Thanks for writing about these tests on the various ad networks and making the results available. It definitely helps businesses considering them but you have a valid point in that it is worth running your own test to see if your results might be better.
thanks Candice – i plan to try out some other programs too and will report back
Hey Allen,
Have you tried advertising on linkedin? It seems like the ultimate litmus test for advertising for your cloudcontacts service.
I’ve been trying to read as much as possible about the new ad system, and frankly, it just doesn’t seem worth it. Just about everyone received the same kind of results you did, including the zero orders.
What I want to know is, why would anyone in their right mind spend money in this kind of system (which is barely monitored to begin with)?
I’ve never seen EC make a sale, but say they did every 300 visits. So say you make two sales with $25. TWO! Go to Google AdWords and you make a sale every 20 (which 5% is sort of low, most people see 7%-10% easily… but for this, lets use 5%). Say you spend $0.20 per click. Which would probably be around the norm. That is $4 per sale. So then, to match EC’s two sales you would spend just $8 in comparision.
So hmm…. $8 or $25…. hmmmmMMmmmmm!
Even Adgitize offers more visitors for your money. People usually see around 700-1200 visitors off of $14, and they stick around longer than EC members too. (I don’t know about sales, haven’t asked)
The system in and that of itself is spelling doom. Even if EC CUT their price in half it still wouldn’t be a deal, IMO. You can easily advertise elsewhere for cheaper and for better quality.
Thanks for posting these figures and your experiences. There are a lot of places to buy ad space and it’s incredibly hard to tell which are a good value!