How many monthly active users do you have on your application? Remember that most of these networks are performance-based, not just click-based, so the higher the traffic the better the odds of someone actually completing an offer.

I believe SocialMedia has a mix of performance-based and other types of campaigns – but if you want to make sure it’s working properly, it might not be a bad idea to drop them a line. As your traffic increases, you’ll see better performance though. Remember that these numbers I’m getting are with 100k monthly active users.

Don’t sweat the “your account balance is too low” bit – SocialMedia lets you choose to run ads on their network (as well as display them). That message is for people who want to advertise their products, service or apps within the SocialMedia network, and doesn’t pertain to folks who are just running ads.

Social Currency is something different – I can probably best explain it with an example. I have an application called Cootie Shots, where people can send cooties to their friends. For every 15 cooties they send, they earn one cootie shot, with which they can cure themselves (or a friend) of cooties. Using Social Currency, I could say something like “earn extra cootie shots by clicking here” – where “here” is a special oage with offers they have to complete. The user earns more “cootie shots”, and I get a cut of the revenue from their completion of the offers. Does that make more sense?

First of all, both of the ads have been installed properly & are logging impressions and such. I installed SocialCash first & begun making money right away(first day). However, it’s been at least 4 days with SocialMedia & it still hasn’t logged a cent. It says I’ve had 431 impressions & 11 clicks, but the eCPM still shows as $0.00, as well as does the money earned. Even more troubling mind you is that when I click on the “Your Account” tab where you set up your paypal info & can make withdrawals and such, there is a banner at the top that says, “Your account balance is too low to run any campaigns. Add Funds to your account”, as if it wants me to give them money before they’ll give me money.

Also, there is a feature on Socialmedia called “Social Currency” which when you add it, it tacks onto your existing ad something that gives you points when users complete an offer that turns into real money for you. Am I supposed to be doing this? It sounded weird, but I was wondering if this was why I wasn’t logging an money earned or if something else was the culprit.

Thanks in advance!

One thing that’s interesting to me is that SocialCash and SocialMedia seem to have an inverse relationship – when I do particularly well on SocialMedia, its often the same day I do less well with SocialCash, and vice versa – which would make more sense if they shared the same ad positions, but they don’t. Curious, but I need more data to really make any sense of it. The fact that SocialMedia’s reporting kinda blows doesn’t help me to make sense of the numbers.

The followups to this article will include screenshots of Facebook traffic + SocialMedia + SocialCash over time, which may help

Thanks for the response. That does shed some light on SocialCash’s methodology. Looking forward to reading more of your experiences! We are currently developing an Orkut application and will most likely develop something for FB in the future. Hence this is all very useful.

rahul

Many of our advertisers take several days to report sales. This means that for the first few we days, we don’t know how much your app is earning. The flip side to this lag is that if you stop running ads with us, you will continue to earn money as sales are reported to us.

This simply means that it will take a couple of days to see a reliable eCPM reading. You’ll find this to be the case with all other performance networks as well. (This is not true with “brand” networks that pay a fixed amount for every impression.)

I actually plan on rewriting this article and making it a series to track progress. In the beginning, I didn’t really handle it properly, mixing and matching where ads were located, etc – so I’d like to continue this with a more stable data set. I wrote this the first week, and have learned a lot about both networks, trends in my own app, etc.

Very useful data. I was curious about a couple of things. What was the click rate on the ads as a percentage of the daily impressions? How much do SocialCash and SocialMedia provide to the developer for each click?

Thanks!
rahul

I have earned $160 from SocialCash, and $90 from SocialMedia, for a total of $250 since I implemented it on the 7th of this month. I added SocialMedia a few days after SocialCash though, and the SocialMedia ads are at the bottom of the page, where the SocialCash ads are at the top. At this rate, it would be fair to assume $300 a month or more, but I will post another update on the 7th of Feb for a complete view.

The stats reporting in SocialCash is much better than SocialMedia – SocialCash breaks down your view by day, where you only have pre-set date ranges for reporting in SocialMedia – kind of aggravating when you’re looking for side-by-side comparisons.

I should also note that my monthly active users are now 96,000 for the Blow Kisses Facebook application – and I’ve added a new application with ads (although that one only has a few hundred monthly active users, as its only a week old.

I look forward to seeing what your results are. If you have good click thru rates, it might be an idea to sell your own ads. I’m sure you’d get a good rate for the numbers you’re getting already

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