Posted 4/17/08 - Kellex
Before reading this, you may want to take a look at the Entrecard Experiement Pt. 1!
The results from our little experiment are in! I'm not sure how positive or astounding they are, but they definitely show you some trends and bring up some interesting thoughts. Like is Entrecard really worth the hassle?
We forked out quite a few credits for some of these just before the pricing adjustment was made and some paid off, while others completely flopped. Many of these blogs' advertising price was running strictly off of reputation or obsessive dropping. Now those aren't necessarily bad things, but they factored into our experiment during the purchasing process.
The major goal with this experiment was to determine if forking out credits for the big dogs was really worth it. Did we get new readers or see a spike in traffic on the days that we were advertising on these blogs? Here are the results.
Ben Barden dot com: 114 clicks
The Blog Entrepreneur: 84 clicks
Sports Business Digest: 83 clicks
TSB Magazine: 58 clicks
ProBlogger: 39 clicks
EpiBlogger: 29 clicks
Stephan Miller: 26 clicks
Le Basketbawl: 25 clicks
The Blue Workhorse: 22 clicks
John Chow dot com: 21 clicks
Chris Guthrie: 16 clicks
Interesting enough? You'll probably notice some blogs missing from our initial list and that was because they registered less than 16 clicks to our site. (The Social Millionaire, Tyler Cruz, and Mr. Javo)
As you can see, Ben Barden's site definitely was the big winner here! Very disappointed in the John Chow and ProBlogger results. I really expected a couple of hundred clicks from these sites and they turned out to be flops compared to the credits we forked out for that ad spot.
One thing to keep in mind, is we were using our ugly old 125x125 card that probably had people laughing at it rather than wanting to click it. This was also during a time when Entrecard was making a ton of changes to their advertising pricing as well as some other site adjustments. There was downtime and some confusion which would have all played a role in the weak results.
One high point was seeing our basketball blog come up in the list and beating out John Chow! We didn't expect it to do much but maybe that has to do with it being a sports site? Another factor was obviously the title of our site that is seen on Entrecard. Being called "The Sports Dollar" could discourage many "money making" bloggers as most are not necessarily the biggest sports fans. When they hear "sports" I'm sure most cringe and go back to crunching numbers on there TI-83.
While advertising on the big dogs, we also did not see a jump in drops to our blog. We were hoping with the added traffic, that our drops would jump and our ranking in the "Internet Marketing" niche would climb. That was not the case although, we did work some of our own Entrecard tricks to get into the top 4 there. (Maybe a future post?)
On a side note, we did purchase an ad on John Cow dot com and during our time, his site was hacked/crashed or whatever you want to call it and it killed out chance to see results.
Overall, this process did not work out as planned. With the amount of traffic some of these sites see on a daily basis, we figured the clicks from John Chow or ProBlogger would have been significant. We were obviously wrong!
With the new pricing adjustment made by Entrecard, you may want to be careful purchasing ads on these big dog sites. The pricing is much higher now than it was when we were buying. Make sure you are actually getting a return for the big time credits you will be forking out.
Right now we are testing out the "ad purchasing whore" technique and we'll see what it does. Building up our brand is the most important goal right now and this could be a great way to start.
Let us know if you have any questions or need more details on the experiment!
The Entrecard Experiment Pt. 2
Thursday, April 17, 2008Posted by kellex at 9:15 AM
Labels: industry news
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6 comments:
thats because the majority crowd on the problogger are intelligent enough to figure out that you offer a shitty site, therefore no click. The ones that did click and go to your site are definitely newbs at the game.
awesome comment.
i'm hoping that is the tyler i'm thinking of.
You should track/show more than just clicks in your results. Show clicks vs. ad price(number of credits) etc. Essentially how much did each click cost you.
That would be a more true marketing measure for evaluating ad expenditures and better for making decisions on future ad campaigns.
Also, because Entrecard is more of a grunt labor approach I would factor in the time it took to acquire all the credit necessary to buy those ads. One could argue your time would have been better spent writing quality posts. Just a thought.
Yeah I chose not to go into that much detail since Entrecard doesn't provide more than I think 10 stats at a time so I was essentially keeping track manually.
The credits for me were not all that important since you can drop 300 in under 30 minutes and once you reach the top of your category you tend to get plenty dropped on you back.
Entrecard does have a stat that shows the rating and whether the ad was worth it or not, but none of these top blogs showed up in the top 10 for that stat except Le Basketbawl coming in at #1!
Maybe in the future more detail could be involved, but this was just a quick test to see if there was any return. Unfortunately there wasn't much.
It's interesting that we probably have 1/10th (making that up, I'm sure it's a bigger number) the traffic of Problogger and we only had 10 less clicks. I can only conclude that our audience is awesome!
Also, and I will need to check the rule books first, I believe you may have just been "owned" by Tyler. :D
Tis true, your audience is awesome!
And Tyler truly is an amazing individual. I'm glad he stopped by to share his wealth of knowledge.
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