Million Dollar Portfolio

My first ad on JohnChow.com has finished running and I wanted to share some traffic results with you.

(click to enlarge this image)

This is a screenshot from Google Analytics. Now, the entrecard ad I placed on JohnChow.com only ran for one day, today. What’s interesting to note here is the referrals come not from John Chow (as there are only 9) but rather from Entrecard. Without knowing how Entrecard works on the back end, I am assuming the referral from the longer entrecard url is my ad, probably the structure from within the system that refers to my site. These stats are from December 1st until today.

So does Entrecard really work?

In a word, yes. The traffic to my blog has certainly increased and I am fairly certain having my ad on a prominent site like John Chow’s has definitely increased. However, what I see here that is really telling is the amount of time spent reading my blog. For the top 5 spots shown, the average is under 2 minutes. The referrals from Stumbleupon are 6 times that. My guess is a lot of the traffic is to drop credits onto my widget and then maybe they read the first post or two. I’m actually totally fine with that because marketing is always about exposure. The more eyeballs you have looking at your product, the more likely it is you are going to sell it, or in this case grab a subscriber or at least another reader. You’ll also notice a fairly high bounce rate which is to be expected considering the time spent on the site on average.

Here is the stats page from Entrecard itself.  You can see I had 81 clicks from John Chow to my site directly from the ad.  Not bad really.  Hopefully some of those clicks turned into subscribers or potential future subscribers if they liked what they saw.

To wrap it up, I think using Entrecard is a great way of getting your brand/product out there and being able to advertise on a site like JohnChow.com for “free” can still have positive results. Of course, if John had the widget more toward the top of his site (above the fold as they say) my results would probably be much different but that’s prime ad space for a site like his and if you can’t pony up the cash, this is certainly the next best thing.

I’ll continue to use Entrecard and keep the widget where you see it on this site so I can pass on the link love and good karma.

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