Is paid content promotion the way to win the marketing battle?

Content Marketing is on the front line in the marketing battle. It’s use is decisive in theaters such as SEO and social media.

While most people (this author included) focus on content creation, they often forget about content marketing.

QuuuPromote offers an easy way out: Pay for it and your message gets posted to hundreds of social media profiles.

I’m not exactly an advocate of social media marketing, but this sounded to good to be true, so I decided to give it a try.

Here is what I learned…

The content I shared

I decided to set this up as a test right from the beginning: I was going to use my article about the best SaaS email marketing tactic I know and promote it on QuuuPromote.

Then I would check how often that link got shared/clicked – except neither did I implement click tracking nor a notification for when the post got shared.

I didn’t have a way to track either clicks or shares besides the analytics provided by Quuu themselves:

Having your own share & click tracking

So with one completely botched-up test under my belt (how can this even happen after years in the marketing game?), I started all over again.

This time I shared an article detailing how we decreased the churn rate by 40% with a single email AND made sure I had click & share tracking in place.

I used a simple “@itengelhardt” at the end of the tweet to track shares. This gave me insight into shares on Twitter.

I don’t know an easy way to track shares on other social media sites, but Twitter seems to be the major channel for QuuuPromote. So I’m good with that.

For click tracking I simply used Bit.ly which does a wonderful job of that, as you’ll see.

Analyzing the results from paid content promotion

The natural tendency is to mistrust any analytics coming from a promotion marketplace itself.

I expected QuuuPromote to over-report both shares & clicks after the first post – which allegedly had 201 shares and 91 clicks.

So after the second promotion has finished, here are the results:

Now this one got a lot more shares, but a lot less clicks according to QuuuPromote. I didn’t count the shares in my twitter stream, but this is what it looked like for four weeks:

Judging from that I’d say that the share numbers are not exaggerated.

But what about clicks?

I’m glad you asked. According to Bitly, the number of clicks are actually under-reported:

Bitly reports a total of 157 clicks – 9 clicks on the link itself, 148 from other bitlinks to the same URL. It also reports 356 shares.

That number is in line with the 353 shares reported by QuuuPromote – plus a few genuine retweets, I guess.

I wonder how and why Bitly actually reports more clicks than QuuuPromote. If you have any ideas, let me know on Twitter (@itengelhardt)

Conclusion

I got 157 clicks (&356 shares) for an investment of $30. That comes down to $0.19 per click, which is phenomenally low Cost-per-Click.

Will I use QuuuPromote again? Absolutely. It’s a cheap investment with good returns and it takes maybe 5 minutes of my time.

-Christoph