Archive: ROI
Every successful campaign is driven by four factors: Clear goals, Creativity, Strategy and Competitive pricing. When running your own campaign you are left to navigate the system unassisted. Wouldn't it be great if you had someone to take your basic goals and turn them into a highly successful campaign? Give us your goals; the Sales Solutions Team does the rest.
What is your goal? Traffic? No Problem. Buzz? That's Easy! We will gladly create a campaign geared to achieve your goals and maximize results.
How much does this excellent service cost? Zip! Zero! Nothing! Nada! All Campaigns over $10K can consult with the PPP Sales Solutions Team at no additional cost.
Please email Randy Mountz, VP of Sales to have The Sales Solutions Team start working on your campaign today. Randy(at)payperpost(dot)com.
Advertisers often ask me ''How can I optimize my campaigns to achieve the highest level of success?'' The most fundamental advice I can give is to KISS, keep it simple silly!
Our Posties see hundreds of opportunities, so it is important to ensure yours is as appealing as possible. The more Posties that are attracted to your opportunity, the better the results you will experience. Making your opportunities clear, concise, and simple is an easy way to attract bloggers.
The following screenshot is a great template to use when writing opportunity descriptions:
When creating opportunities, it’s critical to keep in mind your goals. It is best to optimize an opportunity for a single specific goal. For example, an opportunity geared towards driving traffic would be drastically different than a campaign geared towards generating buzz. If you have multiple goals; then create multiple opportunities, each for one of your goals.
By doing this you can effectively determine which opportunities will advance your specific goals. Approach your opportunities with a clear strategy. For example, you can create two opportunities to generate buzz and one to drive traffic. This allows for an emphasis on buzz while keeping increased traffic in the equation.
Keeping it simple will make your opportunities fun, focused and most importantly, effective!
Always remember that the PayPerPost Sales Solutions Team is here to provide insight and assistance. Please contact Randy Mountz at Randy (at) PayPerPost (dot) com to have the Sales Team consult on your campaigns!
I don't know how many blog postings and articles I have read that have falsely assumed that readers don't click through on sponsored posts. People like Jason Calancanis, Mike Arrington and others would have you believe that nobody is interested in this content and the value it provides. I believe many of these people are the same people that said nobody would ever click on a sponsored search result (enter Google representing 1/3 of all online ad spending on the back of sponsored search).
We now have data from over 40k bloggers and 8k advertisers to prove the naysayers wrong. The truth is that not only do people click on sponsored posts, on average they click through at a higher rate than any other media I am aware of. 10.545% average CTR to be exact (this is an average over all opportunities, obviously some will be much higher and some will be much lower).
My experience in buying Google AdWords is to expect an average of somewhere between .5-1.5% CTR. Sure, I have had keyword campaigns that might have hit as high as 5% or 6% in extreme cases (like buying the keyword "payperpost"), but that is few and far between. I also know that a good campaign on MySpace might deliver a .05% CTR and that other campaigns I have run through Adbrite and similar media networks deliver a lower CTR than search marketing in my experience.
What does this all mean? Does it mean you should dump search or display advertising? No. I have always been a big believer in diversified media campaigns. What it does mean is that sponsored content delivers eyeballs and real, qualified traffic to your site.
UPDATE : There has been talk in the comments about the purchase of products that Posties have been exposed to. Did you buy something you saw on PPP? Let us know in the comments below.
[Hey folks...this is Dan, not chicken hat Dan, but venture capital Dan. I managed to hack into PPP's new blogging platform (hint: Ted's passwords are names from his Littlest Pet Shop collection) and access the Advertiser blog. I wear various PPP hats -- advertiser, postie, investor -- so I'm hoping to hack into all the blogs eventually. Until then, I'll share some thoughts, perspective and experiments for advertisers here. Shhh...I think I hear Mark reconfiguring some firewalls or something...]
As an advertiser and investor, I draw a lot of analogies between sponsored search and sponsored social media. GoTo/Overture was the PayPerPost of sponsored search and pioneered the multi-billion dollar pay-per-click (PPC) search revenue model that funds most of the "cool stuff with no revenue model" that Yahoo, Google, MSN and others provide today. Early adopters of the two platforms were also similar -- with measurement-minded direct marketers leading the way for broad-based online marketer adoption.
Although PPP offers a broader ROI than sponsored search (like the branding benefits, viral opportunity and ROI growth over time from persistent posts), it's worth monitoring best practices in the PPC field for PPP insights. One that hit my inbox recently, was a MarketingExperiments (MktgExp) report on the importance of relevance in paid search campaigns. The folks over at MktgExp reported the results of two case studies:
1) Click-thru-rate (CTR) Impact of Ad Title Relevance, and
2) Conversion impact of Keyword Relevance
I'll leave the detailed process/results to MktgExp, but takeaways from each case study were:
1) The ad title that including the purchased keywords generated 147% more
clicks than those that did not, with CTR almost two and a half times
that of the next-highest treatment. For example, "Encyclopedia Britannica" had much better CTR than "Brittanica Sets" and "2007 Brittanica Set" for visitors searching variations of "encyclopedia" and "brittanica".
2) Purchasing indirectly related keyword terms yielded a higher CTR than directly related keyword terms.
However, the conversion rate decreased from an average of 0.8% for
directly related terms to less than 0.01%. So, despite increased CTR,
the indirect key terms performed much worse where it counts: conversions.
So, how could these results improve PPP ROI? It comes back to relevance: both in the opp description and the link text. Bloggers, readers and searchers are the same people, so the psychology of rewarding relevance remains. All else being equal, opp descriptions that are more relevant to your product or business may garner more interested bloggers (higher opp-take-rate, OTR). Sponsored posts driven by relevant opp descriptions and relevant link text may garner more interested readers (higher click-thru-rate, CTR). And, last, click-thrus driven by relevant opp descriptions and relevant link text may garner more conversions.
My experience has been that CTRs for sponsored posts are already significantly higher than banners and sponsored search. That makes sense given the reader's interaction with sponsored posts versus other online advertising. However, it never hurts to review PPC lessons to optimize PPP efforts. Relevance is relevant!
Guest blogged by Dan...an entrepreneur in venture capital clothing
