We are always looking for new and cost effective ways to bring new people to the site and recently used a new service called VIRURL to see how it compared to other advertising mechanisms.
We have a fairly constant level of unique daily visitors and have had a stable ad rate buy using several other services, so I feel like I can safely say that the VIRURL service, even though it was a small trial run, didn’t work at all for us.
For the number of clicks the reports say they drove to the site, I didn’t see a single statistically significant increase across the time the ads were live with the VIRURL service.
I can’t really explain that, which doesn’t make me feel like it was a useful ad buy. When I spend more on other advertising mechanisms I can map the impacts out consistently. Which makes perfect sense. If I pay for more clicks and that increases traffic, I can see that by looking at the number of unique visitors.
So the only technical explanation I can put forward is that the VIRURL users were already coming to my site – and that the overlap was like hitting the lottery in terms of overall odds. The other explanation is less generous.
I’d love to hear if anyone else had any better outcomes, because I won’t be using the service again at this point and would love to know if you saw any positive outcomes.
