11 Oct, 2008
Entrecard Traffic Experiment Results
Posted by: Singapore Entrepreneur In: Up for Discussion
BACKGROUND
On September 27, I spent 18,000 (+) EC credits advertising on various blogs across the Entrecard Network of blogs. It was meant as an experiment to see what kind of traffic this will generate back to my site. It would, I also thought, put an end to all the conjecture by various EC bloggers and advertisers on whether EC, as it is today, is a proper AD network one can successfully advertise on or NOT.
RESULTS (short version):
(1) Advertising remains too expensive, time consuming, and is a total crapshoot. You really have no idea what you’re getting. I could have spent US$20.00 instead of US$100 and gotten the same results.
(2) Dropping cards is the only sure way to get traffic from EC.
See how seriously screwy the results are:
Ultimately, this was an experiment to determine EC’s ad network value to a commercial advertiser who doesn’t want to drop EC biz cards or participate in the forums to generate return traffic (the only 2 proven ways so far that you will get traffic from EC).
To be considered a successful ad network, the measure I had wanted to use was click thru rate (CTR) and the cost per click (CPC) being equal to (+/- 10%) a similar ad campaign on Google’s Adsense. But as the Google adwords vary in pricing considerably, this was too difficult to compare against 1:1. So I leave it to you, the reader, to decide for yourself whether the results are good enough for you or not.
NUMBERS & MEASURES
(REASON: I did not check because I believe a proper ad network shouldn’t require an advertiser to have to sift through each blog individually if payment up front is expected. They should have already been pre-qualified. Notice that this is different from Google Adwords which doesn’t expect payment just for displaying your ad).
For the period of the advertising run: Sept 28 to October 6, 2008
RESULTS SUMMARY IN CHART FORM
While there was obviously much more activity during the period of the ad campaign, the actual numbers are disheartening. Spending 18,000 to get 900 back- or a 5% return, is dismal.
ACCORDING TO EC, BELOW ARE THE BLOGS THAT SENT ME THE MOST TRAFFIC
As CTR in EC is not qualified, meaning a blogger can just click on the advert on his widget as many times as he wants himself, the following numbers could be totally bogus. If they are not bogus, that means I just wasted a lot of money during this advertising campaign.
WHAT’S WORSE:
I checked when the ad purchase for Literatti-An (the highest CTR) went through- September 26. Is that the day it ran or the day the ad was bought or accepted? If it ran on September 26 and it registered 91 CTR, then the graph is wrong because it says on September 26, I only had 6 CTR from my ad placements. I bought the ad for 64 EC, so if that was the date purchased, then that means the ad would have ran on October 1, 2 or 3, depending on when it was approved, which would mean that, yah, 38% of my CTR came from a single blog, and a cheap one at that.
Interestingly, the second highest CTR is from Manong Ken’s Carinderia and shows that I bought the ad on September 25 for 128, which would mean that the two ads could have possibly ran together. And if they did, that means the two alone gave me 165 clicks (91+74) out of the 240. Mind boggling, don’t you think? I mean, did I just waste A LOT of money? If these stats are correct, yes, in fact, I did.
STATS TO DRIVE YOU NUTS
I received a total of 900 clicks.
Out of this, 422 came from 10 blogs.
The total credits spent for these 10 blogs is 1,568.
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In other words, I spent US$9.40 for 422 clicks and then spent another US$98.59 for 478 of the other clicks! That is utter madness.
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BRANDING DOESN’T HAPPEN IN 24 HOURS
BUT, you may say, didn’t I get “branding exposure” on all the other sites? I have to disagree. With most blogs carrying 15-20 adverts on their sidebars, a mere 24 hours placement on their blog is not branding.
PROBLEMS WITH THE CAMPAIGN
(1) I noticed that during the run there was another EC outage of sorts.
(2) Many bloggers complained about EC slowing down to a crawl (actually, even until now).
(3) There was also the problem of the EC card displaying the same ad for more than 48 hours although when you clicked on it, it did link to the right blog. (So yeah, this totally eliminates the “branding theory” given that your biz card doesn’t even show.)
(4) In the middle of the ad campaign (October 3), I noticed that I still had over 300 pending adverts.
(5) I did not check the stats everyday so I don’t really know how many ads actually ran in the end. I really don’t want to sit and count the number accepted and rejected in my dashboard.
BOTTOM LINE: The EC stats are close to worthless because the numbers could be bogus and there is no consolidation of data (ads approved/rejected, when they actually ran) to determine whether an ad campaign has actually met your targets. The only real numbers (I hope) are the Card Drops. I couldn’t do much of a proper analysis of this ad campaign at all in the end.
GOOGLE ANALYTICS
I did not see a spike in my traffic during the period, just a blip. The average number of viewers remained at around 300-400 per day. This means that much of the CTR on the graphs probably didn’t go through, i.e., they’re fake. The drops maxed at 190 versus 240 for CTR, so will have to just trust the “drops”. Since my blog already has an average of 15 regular card droppers- that leaves 175 as the highest number of drops resulting from the campaign.
Averaging out the numbers over the period of the campaign though shows only an additional 80 visitors/day. How many of these are just serial card droppers? No one knows.
What we do know is that the average bounce rate of this blog over the last six (6) months is 75% with 1.7 pages viewed. For the specific period of September 27 to October 10, it went up to 89.27%, with 1.25 pages viewed.
CONCLUSION
At US$6.00/ 1000 EC, an advertiser is better off using Google Adsense as it is apparent that the EC network of blogs has many redundant users dropping on one another. The EC droppers also visit with the specific purpose to drop their card and not much else (evidenced by the spike in the bounce rate from 75% to 89.27% and the drop in average number of pages read).
Although many would like to claim that it is the bloggers fault for not putting up an interesting enough blog, the fact is, the kind of CTR from EC is very different from someone who sees your ad, clicks on it, with the expectation of exploring more and possibly being converted to a customer. With EC, there is a very specific intent: to drop, to get EC credits. It is akin to someone walking into a restaurant to use the toilet. You don’t blame the joint for not having good enough food, the fact is, that person is not interested at all. They just want to use the toilet.
Dropping is still the only way to go with EC: I got a 5% return in traffic for advertising. Out of 18,000 (++) spent, a total of 900 dropped for their cards on my blog (aggregate from September 29 to October 6). Compare this against 110 drops and 33 return drops or 30% ROI and you have to conclude that the price of an EC credit (especially if all you want to do is advertise), should be closer to US$0.50/1K.
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