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How PurpleAds Became Our Most Successful MVP Ever

ProveSource is one of the leading social proof platforms available out there. More than 20,000 websites use ProveSource to increase trust, conversions and sales on their website.

But, there is a critical pre-requisite to make it work for you and your website: traffic. If your website has no traffic, you won’t be able to generate social proof.

Traffic = conversions + sales = revenue = social proof.

That’s why we have decided to create PurpleAds, to help our customers and everyone else, drive more traffic to their website.

How It All Started

We've decided to create a small landing page for PurpleAds inside ProveSource's dashboard, just to see what would happen. No domain, no public landing page, no search terms - nothing. Just a small landing page inside our own dashboard for our own customers.

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We really had nothing, we just wanted to collect 100 emails / clicks from interested people, in order to start working on it. That's one of the best ways to really evaluate your idea.

In just 3 months, we have collected more than 1,500 responses from interested publishers / advertisers. We then decided to plan and build a small MVP with limited targeting & features, even no password reset.

On Feb 6th, 2020 we have launched the first version of PurpleAds, and sent out a short message to our customers.

This was our most successful MVP we've ever built.

Stats From the First Month of PurpleAds

  1. More than 100 publishers are active in our network.
  2. We’ve paid more than $1000 to our publishers (!).
  3. 120+ ads were approved, with a total of 800K impressions and 17K clicks (!).
  4. We see high CTR with an average of ~3.8%.
  5. Our advertisers got a positive ROI, low CAC.

PurpleAds For Advertisers

PurpleAds is a great way to reach different audiences worldwide through an exclusive network of websites, effortlessly. Advertise your website, product or service to visitors worldwide using our beautiful, non-intrusive ads.

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PurpleAds For Publishers

With PurpleAds, you can create a new revenue stream by showing non-intrusive ads on your website with ProveSource’s style and simplicity.

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Here is a small screenshot from our PayPal account, with recent payments to some of our publishers:

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Fun facts:

  1. One of our advertisers was billed extra $40 by mistake (shit
    happens, it's an MVP).
  2. Our targeting is super simple: country, device and website category.
  3. We've changed our pricing model 3 times in a single week.
  4. We got blocked by AdBlock which is a great honour (LOL).

To sum up: CRAZY!

Thanks for your support!

posted to Icon for group Product Development
Product Development
on March 7, 2020
  1. 1

    Looks interesting and I'd like to learn more. Just FYI, I'm getting an SSL ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID error in Chrome. Could be a result of the recent Let's Encrypt bug/reissue or could be your SSL cert isn't wild card or something like that.

    1. 1

      Can't reproduce - here did you see it?

      1. 1

        I clicked the link in your post to PurpleAds.
        This is what I get: https://mobile.twitter.com/nomis_ton/status/1236625292329979904/photo/1

        If you have a self signed cert your own computer would trust it or if you have previously marked the cert as trusted it would also skip the warning screen.

        1. 1

          Can you share on which you see it and if you keep seeing it if you go to the page in incognito mode?

        2. 1

          Thanks! we'll check it.

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