Social Network CPMs

I hate beating on this dead horse of Social Network CPMs again, but looks like the CPM for ad views is trending down.  See this post which cited a CPM of between $0.10 and $0.50.

Spokeo Sponsored Insertion. Good Deal?

I ran across Spokeo accidentally.  They offer something they called Sponsored Insertion.  You pay them $0.05 (minimum order of 1,000) every time they stick your blog or web page link into one of their users’ profile.  That’s how I think it works just by reading their Advertise on Spokeo page.  They “…help introduce your brands to our users in an effective yet unobtrusive manner.”

Let’s suppose every single user who received one of these Sponsored Insertion actually noticed it (may not be a bad assumption), you are paying $50 CPM!

Wait.  Quoting from Spokeo’s page, Harrison said, “We are still developing our advertising platform, so we don’t offer any tracking or performance statistics.  You would have to manage your own campaign to see how effective Spokeo brings to your brand.  Due to this reason, we are starting our sponsored insertions at a very low price.”

$50 CPM and no tracking or performance statistics?  Am I missing something?  Does anyone have any first hand experience with this to tell me that this is actually a good deal?

How much do social apps worth?

I was at a TiE evening meeting a few nights ago. Ro Choy of Rock You was there talking about advertising on FB apps and expected clickthru rates. He described CPMs of $0.30 to $0.60 as “good,” and CTR of 0.1% – 0.7% as “expected.” They use a variety of methods to fine tune the ads to maximize their CPMs already.

Auto Dealers bidding up CPM on automotive related sites

According to an article on Brandweek,  “CPMs at such sites have risen to as much as $34 compared to only $4 two years ago, according to Cheril Hendry, president of HLF Brandtailers in Irvine, Calif.” The sites referenced are 3rd party sites such as Edmunds.com and cars.com.  There’s even anecdotes of one dealer offered $40 CPM to outbid another dealer’s bid of $20 CPM.

This is in addition to the national brand advertising campaigns by the car manufacturers themselves.

CPM For Superbowl TV Commercials

Superbowl XLII had 97.5 million viewers. Cost for a 30-second commercial spot is $2.7 million. Let’s just assume that every one of those viewers watched every commercial. The CPM works out to $27.70.Actual CPM may be higher cause some viewers may be on bathroom breaks.

Video Overlay Ads

In this interview of YuMe CEO Jayant Kadambi, he talked about the factors affecting CPM on ads inserted into online videos (pre-roll, post-roll, mid-roll, overlays). The interesting demographics is women 18-34 because they are hard to find in the online world.

He said CPM can vary from as low as $1 to $2 to $40-80. <sarcastic>That’s really helpful</sarcastic>, isn’t it?

Cubics ad network on Facebook

I looked at Cubics recently. They deliver ad banners in 4 different IAB dimensions to Facebook applications in much the same way as Google deliver ad banners through AdSense for Publishers. Cubics pay Facebook application publishers in CPM regardless of clickthru. A bit unusual at first, but the CPM is so low that they may have the ability to arbitrage the CPM they pay versus the CPC they collect from their advertisers.

The CPM is as low as $0.31 for a 125×125 button to $0.75 for a 300×250 giant button.

Facebook Pages and Ads – First Impression

I created my first Facebook Pages and also placed my first Facebook Ads.

Facebook pages is a way for you to connect to things other than people, without cluttering your Friend List.  It is a no-cost way of marketing a service. Users can sign up as “Fans” of a Facebook Page. and changes to Facebook Pages show up in fans’ mini-feeds. There are building blocks for Reviews (of the product/service) and Discussion Group. If you change the page often or there are frequent discussions/reviews on your Facebook Page, you can get lots of views without any cost other than your time.

But how do you acquire fans? If you build it, will they come? You can use Ads to drive users to your created Page by making your Page the Clickthru URL for your ads. Ads are basically the same as Flyers. It can be CPM or CPC based. I tried their CPC version. Looks like they reduced the number of characters available in an Ad. You can still have a title and a picture. The longer description seems to be shorted since I was not able to use the exact same ad copy as what I’ve used on Flyers.

When creating a new CPC Ad Campaign, it requires a minimum bid of $0.01 per click and a maximum daily spend of $5.00. I was able to make my maximum daily spend $1 when using Facebook Flyers. With this “new and improved” Facebook Ads, I cannot specify a maximum daily spend of less than $5. Hmmm…they want to make more money. My ad just started running. My bid is $0.20 and it showed about 1000 impressions within the past 20 minutes already. I’m lowering my max bid to $0.10 to slow down the impression rate otherwise I’ll be spending too much money on this experiment.

At this moment, my effective CPM is $0.58 with a CTR of 0.36%. It’s worth noting that the CTR is more than double of the 0.17% when using Facebook Flyers. Facebook is doing something right.

Facebook Flyers No More

Wow! I went over to check my Facebook Flyers dashboard and found this:

I have not had time to check out Facebook Ads yet. More to come…

CPM for text ads on Mobile Web

AdMob is one of the leader of mobile CPC advertising. This article from Mobivity blog talks about the author’s first hand experience with advertising on AdMob.

250,000 impressions with a Clickthru Rate of 0.5%, i.e. 1250 clicks. I don’t know what’s the effective CPC he paid for the 1250 clicks, but he mentioned that his maximum bid was $0.10. I.e. he paid at most $125 for the impressions. The CPM is calculated at $125 / 250K = $0.50 CPM.

Compare this to my CPM value for Facebook Flyers of $0.25 CPM, Mobile Advertising generates better CPM than Facebook.