(Image lost in the Great Update of 2009)

When I originally tossed the Stockmoose up a couple of months ago, it was mostly a prototype–one that had taken a single evening to produce, and one that was based on a single request to my artist girlfriend: “Can you draw me a moose with a tie?” Well, now it’s finally back with a new coat of paint, some basic anti-gaming measures, and a few other things to spice it up. The “borrowed” Yahoo stock charts have been replaced with our own proprietary charts, and each stock now has a sort of miniature info card so the choice isn’t based solely on name-recognition. We also created a list of 25 Silicon Valley stocks that most people around here have probably heard of–just to make it a little more engaging. Some of the early results are actually a little surprising. In our SV25, TiVo is actually pretty close to the bottom while Netflix is near the top. Based on what I know of the two, I would’ve actually assumed this to be the opposite of what would happen.

The most interesting result, though, has been the clickthroughs. As an experiment, I tossed $50 into Project Wonderful to point some traffic at the moose. PW grew up around web-comics, and you pay for time instead of clicks. The resultant CPC is incredibly low ($0.04-$0.05), but it’s extremely low quality traffic–totally untargeted, and often times people just click on the ads because they think it supports the comics they like. Roughly 1 in 8 unique visitors visiting the Stockmoose have been clicking through to Piqqem, meaning the $0.05 CPC for the StockMoose turns into a $0.40 CPC for Piqqem itself. Because our niche is in the financial sector, most CPC ads on Google cost anywhere from $.60 to $1.20 for even moderately relevant keywords.

It gets better. The bounce rate for traffic coming off of the Adwords was in the neighborhood of 70%, while those coming in off of Stockmoose are closer to 40%. I don’t know if we have enough data to be statistically significant or not, but the concept seems sound. Instead of trusting Google to target our ads to relevant “customers” (they’re good at what they do, but there’s thousands of people out there who make a living scamming AdSense), we instead cast a much wider net and do the targeting ourselves. Those that are interested in the stock market, interested perhaps in the wisdom of the crowd, click through to the main site. Those that don’t either bounce or hang out and pick a few stocks in the Stockmoose game. Either way–our “crowd” results get better and we have an opportunity to pitch the main site.  Win win.