Thread by @timsoulo

In December 2021 we have reallocated ~$200k (@ahrefs monthly paid traffic budget) into sponsoring creators & thought leaders in our space.

In case you missed:

https://twitter.com/ahrefs/status/1463495813900820488

Naturally, quite a few people asked me to share our results & takeaways from this campaign.

So here are some nuggets for you.

For $200k we sponsored:

- 72 videos
- 108 podcast episodes
- 138 newsletter issues
- 11 standalone projects and events
- 9 blog articles
- 7 SMM campaigns

Total unique partnerships signed: 60

(..& for 11 folks we were their first sponsor 🤗)

Average deal size was around $2-3k.

The cheapest podcast sponsorship - $140/episode.
(15 for $2100)

The cheapest email newsletter sponsorship - $85/email.
(10 for $850)

The most expensive deal - $20k for annual sponsorship of a marketing community.

Our Partnerships Manager @di_ry exchanged a total of 2k emails and has completed 42 zoom calls (~20 hours) to organise all this.

The original tweet with the announcement has saved us A TON of time finding the right thought leaders to sponsor and provided a ton of warm intos.

I know many of you want to see some precise CPL/CPA numbers or perhaps a comparison of ROI per each channel..

I'm afraid we didn't track any of that. 🤷‍♂️

First of all, many of the deals which we struck back in December will not finish rolling out until late summer 2022...

Secondly, tracking ROI of each sponsored piece of content is nearly impossible.

I already shared my thoughts on the ROI of sponsoring podcasts in this video:



..and I'm pretty sure many of the same principles apply to videos, newsletters, tweets, etc

At first we thought it would be interesting to sum up the total size of the audience that we've reached.

But then there's so much overlap between the followers of people who we partnered with that the total number would likely end up being quite inflated and misleading.

One major concern we had about sponsorships was that people might get used to it and won't talk about us organically afterwards.

Well, it was exactly the opposite.

Many of the folks who we partnered with gave us quite a few organic mentions on top of the official sponsorship.

We also came up with a pretty reasonable framing for our sponsorships:

We didn't pay anyone for their loyalty to our brand or to say good things about us.

We were merely paying them for their work creating content about us, which they wouldn't otherwise find time for.

All in all this whole campaign was quite a learning experience for us.

We'll definitely keep investing into this channel going forward.

And we have already brainstormed quite a few interesting sponsorship ideas that we're going to try next.

So you can totally expect another thread with more of my takeaways a few months from now 😉

Meanwhile...

Let me know if you noticed any of our sponsored content around the web 🙃