Sticky Ads on ClixSense

It was a Friday morning… I’m clicking on ads at ClixSense, and I suddenly notice there are almost no Sticky Ads available right now. There were maybe four or five, and I had already clicked all of them. It suddenly occurred to me — this might be a really good time to run a Sticky Ad of my own.

“Sticky Ads” are what ClixSense calls 24hr fixed ads. They are not pay-per-click. Instead they are pay-per-day. Such ads were introduced at ClixSense just a month ago. They were originally offered at $50 per day but were so popular they just recently upped the price to $67. That’s what I paid for my first Sticky Ad on ClixSense.

Start time: 9:12am.

My first 24hr Sticky Ad at ClixSense brought in 4 new signups in the first 3 minutes.

TRAFFIC AND CONVERSIONS

One Sticky Ad placement makes all previous advertising small in comparison.

Click to watch the hit count climb. I do all my ad tracking with Trck.me and the signups from the ad are to my email list at RocketResponder. (Both Trck.me and RocketResponder are great TimTech products that I use every day. I just love what they do for my business. I’ll have more to say about them in an upcoming post about “The Perfect Campaign.”)

I checked my live ad stats and was amazed to see that in the early minutes my ad page was being shown 30 times a second! That’s a real test of hosting and bandwidth.

I had 24 new signups in the first hour.

Ad pages need to be hosted somewhere on the internet. My custom ad page is hosted at Oakley Studio in a secure data center near Milwaukee, Wisconsin. If you want to run advertising like this be sure you have the unlimited hosting and huge bandwidth to handle a shocking amount of traffic.

Here are final numbers at close of the 24hrs:

• Total page views: 58,711 (according to ClixSense) / 56,860 (according to trck.me)
• 153 signups and 37 confirmations.

But it doesn’t end there. Three days later I sent follow-up confirmations (in RocketResponder) to all who had not yet confirmed their signup, and almost immediately got 7 more confirmations. And then 3 more confirmations came in over the following several days.

One week after my ad ran, I had 47 NEW confirmed signups to my “Amazing Tale” PTC campaign. That’s 47 more people receiving my emails and reading my blog. (One of them may even be you! :)

According to my tracking, the ad had an overall 0.26% conversion rate. Interestingly, the second day (Saturday) got a higher conversion rate (0.36%) with 11,497 page views and 40 signups. That makes me wonder if a Fixed Ad that runs two or three or more consecutive days will get higher and higher conversions each day. A “great” conversion rate would be 2.00%, so I ought to see if I can make some changes to my ad page and achieve an even higher conversion rate in future advertising.

How many of these list signups went on to join one of the 4 PTCs as my Direct Referrals? I can look at my Direct Referrals and see:

• ClixSense – 0 (of course)
• NerdBux – 12
• NeoBux – 0
• ProBux – 8

So that’s 20 new PTC direct referrals from one $67 Sticky Ad at ClixSense.

COST OF ACQUISITION

It’s Day 211 of “The Amazing Tale,” and that ad buy was out-of-pocket, which goes against what I had said in my previous post about earnings paying for spending. Oh well. Sometimes you see an opportunity and you just go for it.

When you are spending money to advertise and attract new subscribers and signups, a very useful business metric is “acquisition cost.” Why? Because you always hope you will make more money than you spend to bring more customers into your business.

Here are two simple ways to calculate acquisition cost, using this ad buy and the resulting new signups and referrals:

$67 ad buy divided by 47 confirmed signups = $1.43 per confirmed signup.

and

$67 ad buy divided by 20 PTC Direct Referrals = $3.35 per direct referral.

So my acquisition cost is $1.43 to get a new subscriber/reader, and  $3.35 to get a new direct referral.

WHAT’S A SIGNUP WORTH?

It’s more challenging to calculate what a signup or referral is actually worth in terms of increased earnings. After all, I probably don’t know how much a signup can earn because my PTC business is still relatively new. And besides, earning from each signup is ongoing. It keeps increasing. It’s a moving target.

But that doesn’t stop me from making an educated guess about what a single signup can earn.

Prior to running my ClixSense Fixed Ad I had $998 in total PTC earnings. I had 239 subscribers to my list, and 40 direct referrals in the PTCs.

Value of each subscriber is $998 / 239 = $4.18 per subscriber.

Value of each direct referral is $998 / 40 = $24.95 per direct referral.

Wow, I’m actually kind of surprised at those numbers! I mean, who wouldn’t pay $1.43 to earn $4.18? Or $3.35 to earn $24.95?

My net profit per subscriber is $4.18 – $1.43 = $2.75

My net profit per referral is $24.95 – $3.35 = $21.60

Of course not all earnings come from direct referrals. Some comes from ME! And depending on the PTC, my earnings may come primarily from rented referrals. But earnings from direct referrals helps me pay for more rented referrals. So basing a simple calculation of worth on direct referrals is a helpful way to understand my business.

PROFITABLE ADVERTISING

One thing for sure, I will be doing more ClixSense Fixed Ad spending because… it’s profitable!

Paid advertising increases my earnings and generates more net income.

Thing is, I would never know this unless I did those simple business calculations:

1. Cost of Acquisition
2. Earnings per Signup
3. Earnings per Referral

And if I can get you to analyze your own business this way, you may discover your own surprising success too. You see, the more effective I am at showing others how to make money in PTCs, the more likely they’ll do what I’m doing, and will keep earning more and more. Everything I can do to help you become successful increases the likelyhood that you will continue to follow my advice and remain an actively earning member of my team. And everything you do to help others become successful will benefit your own success and build your own team.