A few weeks ago, I started a small scale Avatar Marketing case study.
It has now been almost one month and I wanted to share with you the results.
I ended up renting a total of 15 Avatar spots from 15 different Digital Point Forum members for a total cost of $136. The purchase was for one month and while there are a few days left in the campaign, I think I can easily come to a conclusion.
At the start of the case study the members had a total post count of about 22,289. The average cost-per-post came out to be about a little over .006. As of today, the members have a total post count of 25, 057 equaling a total of 2,768 fresh posts since the start of the case study.
From May 22th up to today June 18th, the total amount of Direct, Type-In Traffic (not from the search engines or referral clicks) totaled 186 visitors. Now even if all of the 186 type-in traffic visitors came from seeing the Avatar that would come out to paying like .73 per click for the visits. However, probably only a fraction of the 186 direct traffic visits were from the result of the avatar which would bring the CPC per visitor well over $1 a click. In any case, even .73 per click would be to much to pay.
While this Avatar Marketing case study was not exactly technically detailed in nature, I think it’s easy to conclude that there are far BETTER WAYS to spend your internet marketing budget.
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One thing I see wrong with the test is using digitalpoint forum.
Digital point does not reflect the average internet forum. Digital point is full of internet marketers and search engine gamers. This could have resulted in increased prices as they members know about marketing and selling links plus many members will be completely advertising blind because they are on line much of the time.
I think in a general purpose forum you could buy lower and get more receptive audience, then again how far would that go to push down the price?
Good points. Avatars are sold so much on DP now that people are probably becoming blind to them. Try this on on a forum where it’s something new and it could work better. Then again, it’s still probably not be worth the cost.
[...] How much traffic can you generate from renting 15 avatars on Digital Point Forums? Tim’s got the answer. [...]
Very well done. Liked it, stumbled it.
Thats one more reader for you Tim, keep up the good work.
Good research, we need more of such! I also do some small campaigns to check the traffic quality, maybe I should publish those as well…
This was a very interesting case study. I had never heard that people were selling their forum avatars as advertising space. Before reading your conclusion, I kinda thought it wouldn’t be too successful. Thanks for testing it out!
Cool idea for a case study. Looking forward to seeing if you try ant other tests on this.
Have you done any research on Bl.ast?