Not only did PosterBurner get good results from the sponsorship, but they also get to write an article about the results and bring in still more sales and PR.
I dunno, but it doesn't sound like they got good results.
Ignore the reddit and PRWeb based sales, since it's not really correlated with the DDG spend. And you only have 22 sales originated directly from DDG for a total of $550 in sales.
So they lost half their money, and that's before we talk about their costs. And I'm sure they have a much better profit margin than most businesses.
I can your point about the PRWeb sales, but the reddit ad pct that I attributed to DDG sponsorship was the percentage above average and we've been advertising on Reddit for a few months now. Also, that was also immediate sales. We have a very good percentage of customers that reorder, especially around the holidays, so the final number will be much higher, probably by a multiple of 3 or 4.
I'd be interested in sponsoring DuckDuckGo, but I'd want to make sure I got referrer information.
Does anyone know if this is because DDG is using a redirect in between the link on their site and the advertiser's site, or is it just down to lack of set up on PosterBurner's end?
The ability to track and analyze is critical for a $1000/week spend.
Just use a special landing page like http://yoursite.com/duckduckgo and you just redirect and get your own stats by seing who came to your site from this landing page...
I think the technical reason is that DDG defaults to search over HTTPS (for privacy reasons), and most browsers won't set the referer HTTP header when moving from HTTPS to HTTP.
"DuckDuckGo does not include referrer information in their links. This means that when you click on a link at DuckDuckGo, the site you are going to does not know where you come from."
I imagine there's cumulative effect that will happen: the longer you are a sponsor the more customers that will attract. Also, these new customers might come back at a later date.
You do see duckduckgo.com in the referer, just not the search term. Although, if the person searches via the https version of the website, you wont see the referer unless you're using https your self.
And of course there is always the concept of a landing page, which other people have mentioned.
It's easy to track clicks for a campaign like this.
Reddit advertising ad been bought previously and independently, so yes, it was free in a sense. No additional cost was incurred, and the author made sure to point out that it might not have been a great deal if their situation had not included complementary advertising (or that's how I understood the blurb about strategy, anyway).
It sounds like an all-around benefit to me.