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Socialize Your Marketing Efforts with Opiniads

The following is a paid review for TylerCruz.com written and reviewed by Michael Kwan. It is completely of Michael Kwan’s opinion and is not influenced by being paid. If you’re interested in having your site or product reviewed, please view my advertising page

As you already know, the Internet is getting increasingly more social every day. People are far more likely to “discover” new content or a new product on the web when their friends share it through social media than they are to seek out this new content on their own. From a business perspective, what this means is that one of the more effective ways to reach relevant customers is through the social networks… but customers don’t necessarily want to be “sold to” by the company themselves.

And this is the fundamental idea behind Opiniads, a social advertising platform that connects relevant advertisers with targeted publishers, so that they can share that “fun and interesting content” with their friends and followers. In fact, Opiniads reaches over 200 million unique consumers across 80 countries around the world. Talk about brand awareness!

What Is Opiniads?

Self-proclaimed as “the Chuck Norris of social traffic,” Opiniads is a platform where advertisers can create campaigns to direct traffic to whatever webpage they’d like. This can be used to send customers to a landing page, for example, in an effort to improve direct sales. It can also be used to increase readership of a company blog, increase views on a promoted YouTube video, or draw attention to a great contest that people may want to join. As an advertiser, it’s entirely up to you. The traffic is said to be great for content distribution, music, videos, direct response, and more.

Rather than reaching out to the masses directly, the idea is that an advertiser can buy mentions from the social influencers on the web. These publishers post links to this “fun and interesting content” from your brand on their various social channels, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Tumblr. The publishers get to choose what they want to promote, so the content should always be relevant to their followers and their audience.

What’s important from an advertiser’s point of view is that you are not paying for each tweet or for each Facebook status update. This can burn through your budget very quickly without getting any sort of return on investment. Instead, Opiniads operates on a CPC basis. You put in your bid per click and you “only pay for verified clicks based on your specific targeting criteria.”

Currently, Opiniads drives about six million clicks per day off of Facebook and Twitter in the United States alone.

The Instant Registration

Getting started with Opiniads is a very simple process. The advertiser signup form is a single page where you supply basic information like your name, email address, phone number, IM contact, and mailing address.

It’s fun how they’ve used some more casual language here and that demonstrates that social media is supposed to be, first and foremost, something fun. Instead of asking for “contact information,” the signup form asks, “What’s your name, gorgeous?” The form to sign up as a publisher is very similar, except it asks for how they would like to get paid.

After submitting the form, an automated message is sent to verify your e-mail address. Once you click on the confirmation link, your account is alive and active.

Advertiser Dashboard

The advertiser dashboard is very clean and it gets straight to the point.

Here you can see your current campaigns, tabbed for those that are enabled, paused, out of budget or archived. Adding account funds is easily achieved via PayPal and there is a quick link to create a new campaign. You can tell that the focus is very much on the campaigns and that’s where the attention belongs. You can also see, at a glance, how much you have in total account funds and active campaign funds, as well as how much was spent today.

Toward the top-right corner are much smaller buttons for getting quick access back to the main dashboard, accessing reports, reviewing any banned publishers from your campaigns, accessing the settings panel, and getting any help that you may need.

Creating and Funding a Campaign

Creating a campaign is similarly straightforward, accomplished by filling out a single page form.

The form will ask for a campaign description, overall budget, per-click bid, click URL, and mobile click URL. According to Opiniads, the CPC for direct response starts at about six cents, but can go up to 15 cents, depending on the offer. They recommend an opening bid in the 10 cent range. Content distribution campaigns tend to be less competitive with bids starting at 3 cents per click. You will want to keep your click-thru rate (CTR) in mind when coming up with your bid.

Since you don’t want to pay for irrelevant clicks, you are encouraged to target your campaign too. There is one section to target by country and you can select as many countries as you want. Clicks generated outside of your selection will not get charged.

And you can do the same with targeting by interest. There are many different categories here and you can select as many as you’d like. I’d recommend against using “select all categories” option, as that would get your campaign involved with such categories as Adult, Dating, and Urban Hipsters… which may not be relevant to your objectives.

To help you further optimize your campaigns, Opiniads allows for pixel tracking. After you’ve created your campaign, there is a button available for the “tracking link.” Here, you’ll get the appropriate code for the page tracking link and the conversion tracking link.

Conclusion

Social networking is not the future. It’s the present. And social marketing is very much a big part of the overall picture. If you’re an advertiser looking to reach out to a relevant audience via social media, Opiniads is an option that you may want to consider. You get strong control over your costs and you can target your campaigns based on geography and interest. Since you only pay for verified links, you can have a better grasp over your ROI too.