I’ve received some serious and very valid objections from some providers regarding the Travelstart campaign on our website. Some of our providers offer competitive services to Travelstart and as such this campaign may be bad for their business.

My apologies to anyone who was negatively affected. Our plan in the future is to offer Affiliate Marketing purely as an ‘opt-in’ service. Hotspot Providers will be able to choose in their account manager whether they would like to advertise 3rd party services and benefit from the revenues earned.

Before spending development time on this, we decided to run a test campaign.

Although the campaign ran only 2 days, I thought I’d post up the statistics:

1. Impressions : 227
This is how many times the Travelstart banner was displayed. Most people did not see the Travelstart banner when they logged in as they still had the old Welcome page cached in their browser.
2. Clicks : 6
This is how many people actually clicked the Submit button on the Travelstart banner and saw an offer for a flight.
3. Sales : 0
This is how many people actually bought a flight.

Of course this sample is too small to really make any estimations. Apparently, the average Clicks to Sales ratio is 0.5%, so over time we could have expected to make about 12 sales a month with Skyrove’s current size and with everyone logging in seeing the Travelstart banner.

If you have any ideas for doing advertising through Skyrove hotspots, please let us know. We’d like to implement new features such as these provided that the benefits to Skyrove, Hotspot Providers and end-users outweigh the drawbacks.