About 3 weeks ago, Callum Chapman & I put our landing page live for our new startup, Cappture. We wanted a big launch with huge traffic numbers & a bit of buzz so we decided to invest in advertising on large Twitter accounts using the BuySellAds platform. If you’re unfamiliar with BSA, they essentially make buying and selling ads on websites extremely easy and they’ve also branched out to sell tweets on users Twitter accounts.
So I set myself a $1,000 limit, went browsing and settled on something called the “Design @tweet bundle”. So with this bundle you get to send out your message on 12 design related different Twitter accounts with the amount of followers receiving your message being around 1,590,000 people. We went ahead and bought the bundle, removing 2 of the accounts which I thought were overpriced and adding a Twitter account with an iOS theme. In the end it cost $1,248 and the estimated amount of people who would see it was 1.8m. This puts the CPM at around $0.69 which I thought was reasonable.
Now for the results:
Design Twitter Account #1 – Twitter Followers: 473,205 – Clicks: 575 – Cost: $199.00 – CPC: $0.34
Design Twitter Account #2 – Twitter Followers: 55,283 – Clicks: 203 – Cost: $100.00 – CPC: $0.49
Design Twitter Account #3 – Twitter Followers: 50,879 – Clicks: 240 – Cost: $75.00 – CPC: $0.31
Design Twitter Account #4 – Twitter Followers: 86,674 – Clicks: 371 – Cost: $90.00 – CPC: $0.24
Design Twitter Account #5 – Twitter Followers: 61,386 – Clicks: 124 – Cost: $30.00 – CPC: $0.24
Design Twitter Account #6 – Twitter Followers: 28,983- Clicks: 118 – Cost: $20.00 – CPC: $0.16
Design Twitter Account #7 – Twitter Followers: 42,702- Clicks: 169 – Cost: $60.00 – CPC: $0.35
Design Twitter Account #8 – Twitter Followers: 38,826 – Clicks: 152 – Cost: $100.00 – CPC: $0.65
Design Twitter Account #9 – Twitter Followers: 657,021- Clicks: 593 – Cost: $300.00 – CPC: $0.50
Design Twitter Account #10 – Twitter Followers: 24,592- Clicks: 180 – Cost: $25.00 – CPC: $0.13
iOS Twitter Account #11 – Twitter Followers: 297,436- Clicks: 1,066 – Cost: $249.00 – CPC: $0.23
Total Twitter Followers: 1,816,987
Total Clicks: 3,791
Total Cost: $1,248
Average CPC: $0.33
So what do the results show me? They showed me that people don’t RT advertisements (understandably). Apparently you have to disclose when a tweet was paid for and the most popular way of doing this is through the hash tag #ad. If I was to do this again I’d think about taking the shady option and try and hide the hash tag by doing something like: “this is an example tweet #example #tweet #ad” with the hope that people don’t see the #ad tag. Could work!
Also, I think we may have chosen the wrong niche to target. The reasoning behind choosing the design niche was simple: both Callum and I have worked in the industry and thought that the community would be interested in a photography related app. We also assumed they would appreciate the custom type logo and the background photographs which were all professionally taken exclusive for Cappture. Maybe we should have targeted iOS followers. Something to think about!
6 Responses
Good post, thanks for sharing. I was wondering what was the conversion rate? this is, how many signups did you get?
Hi Jefrey, I don’t want to give the exact number but we got low 3 figures in sign ups directly from the campaign. 🙂
Mat, really hooked on your blog since I saw it on reddit. You might be young, but what you say is inspiring to me (I am a few years older). Thanks for these blogs. Keep up the good work.
Nice post. Mat, you seem to be curious about things. These results shows how patient and vigilant you are to find out truth about things that interest you. And this post really helps. Thanks!
Honestly I had poo-pooed the whole paid for tweet concept as it just didn’t seem like it would convert well. I guess if you have a solid product on offer then you are in with a chance, but seems like you need to hit your niche bang on to really see results.
Nice to see what type of return you saw for the outlay. I will certainly keep it in mind if I ever have a product launch or book launch that needs a bit of fanfare before launching.
Great case study. Shame the results were in the 3 figure mark. Something in the 4 figure mark would have been good but atleast you tried and now know what works and what does not.
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