The clickthrough percentage is impressive.. somewhere just under 3%. The problem, however lies in a lack of conversion.

We had around 97 clickthrough in the last three months for various promotions through websponsors. 1 of those clickthroughs converted to a lead - gaining us $.45

This turns into a CPM of $.05! Am I just having horrible luck, or is this the norm for websponsors?

95% of the promotions we chose to use were targeted, as well. Just didn't convert.

Luckily, VirtualPromote has another set of forums that address just this topic -- our Search Engine Forums.

Good luck!

I would reccommend FreeShop.Com as they have a much better conversion rate than Websponsors. They offer $0.05 per click and 30-50% referral fee on every product ordered. You can link to their main page or if you prefer, to individual products using banners or text links.

In a nutshell, if you had sent 97 clicks to FreeShop.Com you would have earned at least $4.85 as well as the 30-50% commission on anything that was ordered

There's a lot to know about search engines, and you haven't given much information. However, I can say that several of the major search engines seem to be having problems (or something) right now. Pages are in, out, in, out. So perhaps nothing is wrong.

Secondly, if you're using a program to submit your pages, or submitting too many pages at one time (in some search engines), you may run into trouble. Infoseek, for one, says something about this in their Guidelines. In general, I'd say it pays to manually submit your important sites.

Third, if the pages you are submitting have some of the older "tricks" ... such as same color text/background or endlessly repeated keywords, they may get thrown out of search engines.

There really is a great deal to know about this. I cannot say without looking at your pages what is causing the problems. I again suggest the Search Engine Forums.

We didn't get paid for those either.

I'm going to write a letter asking them to doublecheck their stats.. we'll see where it goes from there.

Reading the VP forum information, I realize that it is not me, but the SEs.

You may want to submit your site below for a review, but ask for input on your search engine readiness--be sure to let everyone know what keywords you are trying to maximize your page for.

[Please respect our guidelines regarding solicitating. - Janet]

[This message has been edited by Janet Berg (edited 05-01-2000).]

It comes out that they say the statistics are accurate.

I'm still somewhat suspect. One of the promos I was using from them was JobsOnline... which I have since joined the affiliate program for.

The affiliate program is converting just fine. I guess, however, that conversions are something that you just can't predict.

quote:

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In the table below are the totals as reported to us by the various advertisers who host their own offers, or recorded by our own servers for the offers we host. While we may sometimes update this page in the middle of the week, please know that this data is generally updated Saturdays. Also the date through field explains what the stats shown for a particular offer cover, as you know we report data when we receive it, which means that the dates would be different depending on the ads, as some advertisers send us such data on a daily, weekly, bi-weekly and even monthly basis.

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From this it looks to me as if websponsors don't track signups themselves, they depend on the advertisers to send this information to them. This to me is kind of crazy as websponsors don't have any way to check if stats are being under reported by advertisers and the whole thing is based on trust.

Not the best way to run things.......

Stephanie