DuckDuckGo Sponsorship By The Numbers | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckGo Sponsorship By The Numbers

posterburner.com

72 pointsjordanmessina20 comments

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.

It sounds like an all-around benefit to me.

Yeah, and DDG's being advertised on their blog for free after making $1000 by being sponsored by them, that's a pretty good deal.

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.

Hey vaksel,

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 should have thought of this earlier. If you send it through a redirect url (or even better a special DDG landing page), it is certainly traceable.

I believe DDG doesn't set a referrer for privacy reasons.

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.

I don't get. We don't they use an special query string to identify the origin? Like the utm_ from Analytics.

Surely if users are tracked then this is no longer a privacy respecting search engine.

"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."

Assuming they're refering to an ad, and not a search result, why not just link to http://www.mysite.com/?ref=ddg ?

They probably didn't think of it initially, and then discovered the lack of referrer.

$1000 for $1300 in sales seems high, is 75% ad spend normal for the industry ?

Hey ig1,

We have a pretty high reorder rate so the cumulative effect of the sponsorship will probably be more than double the initial sales.

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.

The second sponsor (hostgator.com) has taken this approach. They're sponsoring for two months.

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.

We spent $1000 dollars to get $1300

So reddit advertising was free or am I missing something?

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).

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