

Ask HN: Anyone have experience with Trada.com? - parkern

Would love to hear advertisers thoughts on using this service.  Did you see a positive net gain?  What was your budget?  How did the system work for you?
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DanielKehoe
I used Trada on a partner's project for several months in summer 2010 (for a
self-help product sold online). Since then Trada have improved their platform
but I haven't tried it again. Our budget was $3000/month (the minimum required
to establish a Trada campaign). We'd had a successful PPC campaign before
using Trada and were hoping to improve sales volume and efficiencies. After
six weeks, we halted the Trada campaign because we were burning through our
budget. Our unit sales increased 1.5x but our costs increased 2.5x. We found
that the Trada "optimizers" were incentivized to maximize traffic but not
cost-per-action. Our Trada rep told us that if we stuck with it, our CPA would
improve and incentives would shift to a CPA-based reward system. But we were
losing so much money on each sale with the increased PPC expense we had to
halt the campaign. Trada is legit and we were treated well by our rep and the
optimizers. I learned some things about how to improve a PPC campaign. But the
operation that was in place when they launched last year was not optimal for
our small "mom and pop" ecommerce business. It was better suited for a large
online agency or consumer brand business that could spend $10,000 and recover
the upfront learning costs in improved sales over six or more months. Again,
they have changed their platform in the last few months so maybe it works
better now for businesses like mine. But expect to drop a lot of coin before
seeing results.

~~~
ElaineEllis
Hey Daniel, thank you for your honest response! I work at Trada. One of the
biggest changes we made at the end of 2010 with the platform is ensuring that
Optimizers were incented to have a CPA focus. We introduced a mechanism our
CEO refers to as crowd mechanics that changed how we rewarded Optimizers.
(Read more here: <http://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/29899/crowd-mechanics/>)
It changed the financial rewards to be significantly more CPA focused and the
results have been seen immediately by both Advertisers and Optimizers.

It is true with many paid search campaigns that you'll see the CPA spike until
you have refined what is working (whether in Trada or not). This is fairly
typical but the advantage of Trada is having the paid search experts to help
you quickly refine the campaign and help you build out your long-term
keywords.

I'm sorry that we weren't a fit for you at that point. If you'd be open, I'd
love to give you a tour of the new marketplace and also have support listen in
so we can better figure out what didn't work for your campaign.

Let me know if you'd be up for it. Thanks, Elaine (elaine at trada.com).

