How Many Hits Do You Use To Evaluate A Sponsor
 

Obviously you can't evaluate a sponsor's performance on a few hundred or a couple thousand hits. I look at each sponsor I start promoting after sending them about 6k hits, since I feel that gives me a fair test of their overall conversions.

What does everyone else do on this? How many hits to you send a sponsor before you decide they're underperforming?

I try to send between 5000 and 10000 hits to a SITE (not sponsor) before I make any real evaluation, but sometimes I can get a feeling for a dud after a few thousand hits.

I believe Jim recommends 5000 hits as a 'minimum' number before passing judgement on the site.

Here's an excellent article that answers that question. It's a bit technical, but it has some valuable ideas.

http://www.buildinganempire.com/poisson2.html

Beano took the words out of my mouth :)

I always send between 10,000 and 20,000 depending on the traffic source and how I'm sending the traffic before I evaluate a sponsors site.

Hugs,
Danielle

I usually do at least 10k hits before I decide to keep/drop the site.

Yep, 5000 has been my number for years :)

is there a cut-off if the site is doing an O-for... like if it hits 0 for 3500 do you still send more hits? serious question... I'm trying to learn here ;)

Another question on this... do you consider a time frame when making this determination? For example, if I send only 25 hits a day to a site, it'll take 200 days to get to the 5000 hits. Is 5000 still the "magic number" or do the daily hits figure into this?

I'm not really pushing enough traffic ATM to go by 5K per site, but since a great deal of my traffic comes off my LL I get to promote every site for a given sponsor. I think based on what I've heard I'll move my cutoff for a program up to 12k hits.

Kinky: My personal opinion, if I've got a sponsor that goes 0:6000 I drop them like a bag of lit dynamite, but I go to at least 6k since I've had sponsors not convert at all then got a shitload of sales in a short period, bringing their overall conversion ratio to a respectable level.

Bare: I don't personally consider time frame, but I can't speak for others :)

I've seen this discussed before and people appeared to be in agreement that 5k hits spread over a longer period of time don't seem to produce as many sales as 5k in a quick spurt. It's one of those internet porn voodoo things.

i normally click a sponsors link a couple of times myself then go post a thread about the poor results at gfy

Normally 10k per site like Beano said, and Not sponsor.
Total sponsor stats may show 3:8400 but check stats and one site may be 1:75 :)
But gut instinct sometimes prevails... if I get the hoop for 6-7k I'll pull the plug.

I have had many times I would be doing 0:5000 or so and then all of the sudden it drops to something like 1:800 or better with another 1000 hits or so.

Hugs,
Danielle

So are you saying 10k to the site itself and not the sponsor?
That would mean if you had a 4% CTR than 400 surfers would visit your sponsor and you feel 400 visitors to your sponsor is enough to determine good or bad?

bill155 - I mean 10k actual clicks to the site. ie Sponsor A has 10 sites to promote, you can't lump them all together.

Thanks for clearing that up.

Some of it may be voodoo, but one thing happens for sure: if everyone in the world is promoting a site, you need to be the first one sending any particular surfer there to get his join. So, if it takes you years to send that 5K in traffic, an awful lot of your would be sales are going to other webmasters who send the surfer there before you. This is especially true for small, new sites. When a site just comes on line, it's not unual to see unbelievable ratios... which steadily decline over time. Even if they end up plateauing at "good" numbers, they aren't as impressive as when they were "new out of the box".

Also, I think one thing being left out of this discussion is that you really have to be honest in evaluating how good your own traffic is and what your own historical conversion ratios are. If you've got great niche traffic which converts well (say you've got ebony traffic which has been converting at a bunch of sites at 1:100), you don't need to run the same type of "tests" as if your best conversion ever were running at 1:2500. Not all traffic is created equal.