I’m able now to make an anecdotal comparison between what I’ll call a “regular” online release and a release with a NewsAd.  Although the content of this release was also submitted through a national news wire, these specific versions were not, so we are able to take the news wire influence out of the equation.

The first release was submitted to PRX Releases.com.  On PRX Releases, the click-through rate is typically organic.  In other words, it takes time for people to discover the releases on the internet.  I have a number of releases on the site with hundreds of views, but they’ve achieved higher numbers over a period of several weeks.

The second release, supported by a NewsAd, is actually more difficult to find on the internet.  It is linked to the PRX Builder site and is optimized for search, but there aren’t any direct incoming links.

After 2 days, the regular online release that depends on SEO and  browsing alone, has a total of 27 clicks.  As I mentioned, over time, this number will climb to several hundred, but it will take longer.

The NewsAd release has accumulated 182 clicks in the first 2 days.  I should also mention that I have been working with a budget of $10 per day for Google AdWords.  Once I hit my maximum per day, Google no longer displays my ads until the next day.  If I were to adjust my spending higher, I would likely acquire more clicks.

I haven’t done a thorough job of setting up analytics to measure how long people are visiting the releases and which links they are clicking within the release.  I’ll attempt to study those things more closely on a future release.  For now, however, with this release, my NewsAd-assisted release is almost 7 times more likely to be viewed when compared to my SEO release.  Additionally, the Google ad itself has been displayed over 430,000 times across the internet.  Although the 430,000 viewers didn’t see the full release, they’ve at least seen the name of my product and a little blurb about it.

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Technology

I haven’t talked much about the technology behind NewsAds.  I’ll plan to go into more detail on that in a future post.  I’m using the Google AdWords API to electronically transmit the NewsAd over to Google.  It was a fun and interesting challenge to get this working.  One of the toughest tasks was waiting two weeks to get my official API key back from Google.  

The tech side appears to be working well, and I plan to open this up to everyone soon.  In the meantime, you can still contact me if you’d like to try it out now.

 

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