Even though my Sponsored ad experiment isn’t quite over, in the sense that I’ve bout $4 cash left in it, I’ve already come to a conclusion about it.
Basically its: If you want some extra hits for a couple of days, you can use it. You’ll get approx 200+ extra hits a day, but it’s expensive!
If you join up to Adgitize you can pay one dollar less and get a whole month of hits! That’s even before you consider that you can actually make all your money back and more on Adgitize if you post and click daily!
So, the Entrecard sponsored posts are effective in driving extra traffic to you for a short while. It may be worth it if you want to promote something to extra people, but overall it’s probably not worth the value for money.
If you advertise in all categories on EC, then you’ll get through about $10 a day. If you advertise in one category you’ll go through about $1 a day, but you won’t get many hits. After four days of ‘Category’ advertising I’ve had an extra 63 clicks to my blog.
I had my ‘All Category’ one going for about two and a half days and had 488 clicks. I’m going to blow the remaining dollars on another All Category one I think. Watching the current one go down is like death by a thousand drops. Apart from there won’t be a 1000 drops!
Current Stats below, bearing in mind my All Cat one is paused at this moment:
Status active Category Mixed Bag
limits Is Blog Category Only
payingper -impression impressions 1899 cpm $1.2000
clicks 63 cpc $0.0362 ctr 0.0332
approval % 13.0%
Status paused Category Mixed Bag (though it isn’t!!)
limits Is Blog
payingper-impression impressions 29811 cpm $0.6000
clicks 488 cpc $0.0367 ctr 0.0164
approval % 35.3%
Cornyman has a great rundown on this as well, as does Eli from Business Sphere Consulting.
Both Corny and Eli seem to have come to the same conclusion as I have! Check their blogs out anyway, they’re both good reads. 
I think you did better than I did. I’ve spent down my funds and won’t do it again. I did it mostly out of curiosity. I’m not curious anymore and I’m not interested in doing it again either.
Thank you so much for keeping those stats and sharing them! I’ve basically come to the conclusion that if one values their time, advertising on EC is very expensive…and now the cash option doesn’t sound much better.
Thanks for linky love, Chinaren
The approval rate is very low in the targeted category, just 13%?
But the CTR is the double amount which equals the doubling in the price (instead of 60 cents for 1.000 adviews, 1.20 $).
I think it’s like i wrote, too, the longer the ad is in the system, the less clicks it will get (or the approval rate will drop more).
I guess, you have been more lucky with your clicks as you have been one of the first sponsored advertiser and at that time (the first day) you shared the ad spots with just 3 other advertisers.
Eli made a 2nd ad today, lets see if he still can score more than 580 clicks or if it will look very different from his first ad campaign.
Thanks so much for sharing your stats with all of us. It sure helps in deciding what to do.