This is a review of Winterplay Studios' traffic service. While they've been growing their service offerings over the last 2 years we wanted to focus on their original product offering of website traffic campaigns.
A Brief Intro
Winterplay Studios is an online marketing agency that's been around for a couple of years. In recent years they started expending their offerings to include backlinks and social media services, but their primary bread and butter is website traffic promotions / campaigns for business owners and affiliate marketers, so we'll focus primarily on the traffic service.
Winterplay Studios' Traffic Service
Historically most people who has a marketing need, i.e., traffic, uses an ad networks like Facebook Ads, Google Adwords, Media.net, ProperllerAds, etc. These ad networks generally require users to have some knowledge of digital advertising in the form of knowing how to target your audience, how to create your ads, how to set location targeting and more. Anyone that's used Facebook Ads will attest the immense amount of targeting options Facebook provides, and these targeting options are generally available in one form or another in the other ad networks as well.
This is all great for the experience digital marketer or sophisticated businesses who has a marketing team, but for small business owners or online affiliate marketers, the learning curve for digital marketing and buying traffic can be jarring, which is where Winterplay's traffic service comes in.
Winterplay Studio's traffic service's biggest selling point in our opinion is how easy they make buying traffic. They're in essence a wholesale firm that acts as a middleman between ad networks and small business owners. They do most of the leg work in terms of ad targeting and ad bidding, and package these into 'traffic plans' for business owners or marketers to pick and buy. Winterplay's primary selling point is that they make buying traffic easy as compared to most traditional ad networks.
When we purchased their traffic plan, we were able to provide up to 3 keyword phrases, these can be anything like "batman t-shirts for sale" to "Boston mechanic", and they use the keywords to bid on large quantities of traffic at wholesale prices, and then funnels this traffic to end users like us. This brings about the second good point about their traffic service, which is that it's fairly priced. Even though they act as a middleman between ad networks and end-customers, they're able to still provide very competitive prices. Their basic plan offers around 6,000 visitors (actual clicks) for around $35-50 (before discounts). This is around $0.005 - $0.008/click. This is significantly cheaper than the average Google Ad cost as shown below.
Source: Google, updated as of November, 2019. All amounts in USD.
As you can see, the average cost per click (CPC) is around $2 for Google search results, and $0.64 for Google display network. This brings us to the biggest negative for our review of Winterplay Studio's traffic.
Winterplay's traffic has a lower conversion rate as compared to other traffic sources. We've tested a few plans for various websites and keywords, and their conversion rates are consistently lower than other ad networks. We believe this is likely due to how they bid on their wholesale ads to began with. Their wholesale bidding likely results in lower granularity in ad targeting as compared to if you had bid on ads in ad networks yourself.
The other reason we believe why their conversion rate is lower is because their geo-targeting abilities are limited to using keywords, i.e., by adding the location of your desired State, County, or City in your keyword phrase. This is unfortunately a lesser effective way of targeting your desired audience than only showing ads to within a small geographical region.
Conclusion
What we found in our review of Winterplay Studios' traffic is that it's cheaper, and simpler to use, while also offering a lower conversion rate. In our experience, we found that the significantly lower cost of their traffic plans still made their traffic a cost effective option as compared to traditional ad networks. In emailing their support team, we were also advised that they purposely priced their plans lower as they're aware of the lower conversion rate of their traffic, which we believe is reasonable.
In summary:
Pros:
1. Very cheap and affordable traffic. Under $0.01/click compared to $0.64/click for traditional ad networks. A good option for people with a smaller budget.
2. Easy to use, setting up a traffic campaign takes 2 minutes. While setting up a proper campaign in Google Adwords will take a few hours to a beginner.
Cons:
1. Limited targeting options. Can only use keyword phrases to target traffic, while most traditional ad networks allow for audience, interest, region and more targeting options
2. Lower conversion rate as compared to traditional ad networks. Google Adwords cost over 60 times more per click, but also provides higher conversion rates (likely not 60 times better though).
Ultimately we found that the pros out-weight the cons primarily because even though their conversion rate is lower, the cost of their plans is attractive enough to still earn a reasonable return on investment, especially for most people who has a budget under $1,000/month. If you have a larger budget, we highly recommend using a traditional ad network in parallel with Winterplay's.
We hope this has been helpful for anyone considering their services.
Companies mentioned in this review are listed below:
A Brief Intro
Winterplay Studios is an online marketing agency that's been around for a couple of years. In recent years they started expending their offerings to include backlinks and social media services, but their primary bread and butter is website traffic promotions / campaigns for business owners and affiliate marketers, so we'll focus primarily on the traffic service.
Winterplay Studios' Traffic Service
Historically most people who has a marketing need, i.e., traffic, uses an ad networks like Facebook Ads, Google Adwords, Media.net, ProperllerAds, etc. These ad networks generally require users to have some knowledge of digital advertising in the form of knowing how to target your audience, how to create your ads, how to set location targeting and more. Anyone that's used Facebook Ads will attest the immense amount of targeting options Facebook provides, and these targeting options are generally available in one form or another in the other ad networks as well.
This is all great for the experience digital marketer or sophisticated businesses who has a marketing team, but for small business owners or online affiliate marketers, the learning curve for digital marketing and buying traffic can be jarring, which is where Winterplay's traffic service comes in.
Winterplay Studio's traffic service's biggest selling point in our opinion is how easy they make buying traffic. They're in essence a wholesale firm that acts as a middleman between ad networks and small business owners. They do most of the leg work in terms of ad targeting and ad bidding, and package these into 'traffic plans' for business owners or marketers to pick and buy. Winterplay's primary selling point is that they make buying traffic easy as compared to most traditional ad networks.
When we purchased their traffic plan, we were able to provide up to 3 keyword phrases, these can be anything like "batman t-shirts for sale" to "Boston mechanic", and they use the keywords to bid on large quantities of traffic at wholesale prices, and then funnels this traffic to end users like us. This brings about the second good point about their traffic service, which is that it's fairly priced. Even though they act as a middleman between ad networks and end-customers, they're able to still provide very competitive prices. Their basic plan offers around 6,000 visitors (actual clicks) for around $35-50 (before discounts). This is around $0.005 - $0.008/click. This is significantly cheaper than the average Google Ad cost as shown below.
Google Ads Pricing
|
||
|---|---|---|
| Industry | Average CPC (Search Network) | Average CPC (Display Network) |
| Advocacy | $1.43 | $0.62 |
| Auto | $2.46 | $0.58 |
| B2B | $3.33 | $0.79 |
| Consumer Services | $6.40 | $0.81 |
| Dating and Personals | $2.78 | $1.49 |
| Ecommerce | $1.16 | $0.45 |
| Education | $2.40 | $0.47 |
| Employment Services | $2.04 | $0.78 |
| Finance and Insurance | $3.44 | $0.86 |
| Health and Medical | $2.62 | $0.63 |
| Home Goods | $2.94 | $0.60 |
| Industrial Services | $2.56 | $0.54 |
| Legal | $6.75 | $0.72 |
| Real Estate | $2.37 | $0.75 |
| Technology | $3.80 | $0.51 |
| Travel and Hospitality | $1.53 | $0.44 |
Source: Google, updated as of November, 2019. All amounts in USD.
As you can see, the average cost per click (CPC) is around $2 for Google search results, and $0.64 for Google display network. This brings us to the biggest negative for our review of Winterplay Studio's traffic.
Winterplay's traffic has a lower conversion rate as compared to other traffic sources. We've tested a few plans for various websites and keywords, and their conversion rates are consistently lower than other ad networks. We believe this is likely due to how they bid on their wholesale ads to began with. Their wholesale bidding likely results in lower granularity in ad targeting as compared to if you had bid on ads in ad networks yourself.
The other reason we believe why their conversion rate is lower is because their geo-targeting abilities are limited to using keywords, i.e., by adding the location of your desired State, County, or City in your keyword phrase. This is unfortunately a lesser effective way of targeting your desired audience than only showing ads to within a small geographical region.
Conclusion
What we found in our review of Winterplay Studios' traffic is that it's cheaper, and simpler to use, while also offering a lower conversion rate. In our experience, we found that the significantly lower cost of their traffic plans still made their traffic a cost effective option as compared to traditional ad networks. In emailing their support team, we were also advised that they purposely priced their plans lower as they're aware of the lower conversion rate of their traffic, which we believe is reasonable.
In summary:
Pros:
1. Very cheap and affordable traffic. Under $0.01/click compared to $0.64/click for traditional ad networks. A good option for people with a smaller budget.
2. Easy to use, setting up a traffic campaign takes 2 minutes. While setting up a proper campaign in Google Adwords will take a few hours to a beginner.
Cons:
1. Limited targeting options. Can only use keyword phrases to target traffic, while most traditional ad networks allow for audience, interest, region and more targeting options
2. Lower conversion rate as compared to traditional ad networks. Google Adwords cost over 60 times more per click, but also provides higher conversion rates (likely not 60 times better though).
Ultimately we found that the pros out-weight the cons primarily because even though their conversion rate is lower, the cost of their plans is attractive enough to still earn a reasonable return on investment, especially for most people who has a budget under $1,000/month. If you have a larger budget, we highly recommend using a traditional ad network in parallel with Winterplay's.
We hope this has been helpful for anyone considering their services.
Companies mentioned in this review are listed below:
I tried their traffic program based on your review, so far it's pretty good (2 weeks in). Thanks for the write up.
ReplyDeleteWhat's your opinion on their traffic now?
DeleteI've been very happy with them. We upgraded our plan and have been using them on a monthly basis for our store since and we've had great results since last year.
DeleteWe tried 2 other ad networks which were complete disappointments. Winterplay was the only one that helped us and has consistently provided really good support to our questions or changes we've wanted to be made for our campaign.
We started using their backlink service earlier this year and our keyword (we sell specialty coffee) now ranks on the second page for our search term, we'll see how it goes but so far it looks promising. I can update in a few months if anyone's interested.
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