Diorex

Recently we were approached by MSN (where we still cant get a rep for adcenter!) about buying a text link on the upper left corner of the home page.

After negotiating a bit, we got a price that I thought was too expensive, but our mantra is “We test everything”, and the senior partner liked the idea, so we created a custom landing page for a product we thought would have a broad untargetted appeal and told em we would take it for one whole day.

50,000 or so clicks, around 1% conversion, which was not so bad all thing considered.

Bottom line - we took a bath, but we saw some things that we could possibly improve on.

Ideas for next time -

1. Did we get the best possible rate? “Mark Twain - Fun Facts” ran a few days after ours, which leads me to believe that there might be remnant inventory.

2. We offer a “free” product that requires a credit card. Did the “Free” drive the traffic or would another headline have converted better?

3. What other products could we sell there that do not require payment? Name Squeeze page? Free Consultation? Lead gen?

4. Our margins on product are nice, but per unit is sub $50. What about an item with much higher per unit payouts? 1% at 5x the payout and now we are talking.

5. This product tends to be a one shot deal. What about a product that continues to pay over and over again.

For us this was an expensive investment. I think the difference between success and failure in the long run is do you decide this does not work and eliminate it from the list, or do you repackage and learn from it?

Traffic volume was nice, how can i monetize the traffic to earn money?

That should be on a bumper sticker: I wish I could monetize this traffic… or Honk if you can monetize traffic

This entry was posted on Friday, December 15th, 2006 at 11:49 pm and is filed under MSN, Non Search Ads. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.