SoftwareGeek
01-29-2010, 06:32 AM
I haven't seen a ton of numbers and detail about muses, so I thought I'd throw mine out there for everyone's benefit. I'd also love to get some feedback. I think I'm at a reasonable go, no-go decision point, and I'd like to get some other opinions. In the interest of everyone (including me) learning as much as possible, I'll try and be as completely open as I can.
First off, the landing page:
http://www.gradeomagic.com
The service is a grading service for teachers. The idea is that they scan or fax their quizzes, tests, and homework in and mechanical turk workers grade it. Once grading is done, they get sent an email to a complete grading report broken down by student and by class, plus a pdf with graded versions of all the work, plus grading slips they can print out and attach to the original hard copies.
There are existing web-based gradebooks which seem to have reasonable traction(http://www.mygradebook.com is an example), but no service that will actually do the grading for you. After talking with teacher friends of mine, they said they'd be interested in using such a service, and would be willing to pay a decent amount for it.
I've been running adwords to drive traffic to the site for about a month now, and my stats are as follows:
Total adwords spend: $232.85
Total adwords clicks: 284
Total adwords impressions: 39,316
Average CTR: 0.72%
Total adsense spend: $14.28
Total adsense clicks: 20
Total adsense impressions: 50,849
Average CTR: 0.34%
Total facebook spend: $64.72
Total facebook clicks: 61
Total facebook impressions: 497,762
Averate CTR: 0.012%
I've gotten 12 conversions, 10 on the old site (http://gradeomagic.weebly.com/), and 2 on the new site. When I switched from the old site to the new site, the old site was getting around 5% conversion rate from adwords traffic. However, the old site only asks for the user's email address to be added to a beta list (though it's below a headline stating the service costs $50/month). The new site leads the user to what looks like a full signup form with a price clearly at the top of the page, and a full name, address, email, etc form. As far as I can tell, adwords traffic is the only traffic that's converted. Adsense and facebook were total wastes of time and money.
I was rather excited about a 5% conversion rate. However, on the new site the conversion rate is more like 1%. It looks like only 16% of the traffic that goes to the homepage makes it to the signup form, and then only 6% of those people convert.
So, the first big question I have is whether I'm going to be able to drive enough conversions for little enough money to make this fly. 1% conversion rate seems pretty low.
Now, on to cost.
I figure I need to have 2-3 workers look at each page of the test. I spent $150 to have a Romanian programmer write a quick flash app to do the actual grading, and put some sample jobs up on Mechanical Turk. I started at $0.10 a page for a 2nd grade math quiz, which several workers remarked seemed like a really good wage. I then tried another job at $0.01, and got reasonable quality work, but there was less satisfaction with the wage.
I figure that an average teacher might have as many as 80 students. This means if they give a 2 page test (single sided, or one double sided page), then this results in 480 pages that need to be graded, if every page is graded 3 times. The total cost of this, assuming I pay workers the lowest wage possible of $0.01, is $4.80. If I put a 2.5x markup on this, this becomes $12.00. Based on feedback from the teacher that sent me the test quizzes, something of this magnitude would take her 2 hours to grade, which translates to an effective $6/hour wage/cost for her.
I can't imagine marking these prices up that much higher and still getting teachers to go for it. However, I'm really concerned that the markup is too low (Tim recommends 8-10x), and having a rock-bottom worker wage doesn't give me much room to play (doubling it to $0.02 throws the numbers totally out of whack).
What do you think? Is this a viable muse? Is it worth continuing to test, or is it best to throw in the towel? What changes would you test before giving up? Or are the numbers just not good enough to continue?
I'd love to hear any and all feedback you have, and I hope the above numbers are useful to others.
First off, the landing page:
http://www.gradeomagic.com
The service is a grading service for teachers. The idea is that they scan or fax their quizzes, tests, and homework in and mechanical turk workers grade it. Once grading is done, they get sent an email to a complete grading report broken down by student and by class, plus a pdf with graded versions of all the work, plus grading slips they can print out and attach to the original hard copies.
There are existing web-based gradebooks which seem to have reasonable traction(http://www.mygradebook.com is an example), but no service that will actually do the grading for you. After talking with teacher friends of mine, they said they'd be interested in using such a service, and would be willing to pay a decent amount for it.
I've been running adwords to drive traffic to the site for about a month now, and my stats are as follows:
Total adwords spend: $232.85
Total adwords clicks: 284
Total adwords impressions: 39,316
Average CTR: 0.72%
Total adsense spend: $14.28
Total adsense clicks: 20
Total adsense impressions: 50,849
Average CTR: 0.34%
Total facebook spend: $64.72
Total facebook clicks: 61
Total facebook impressions: 497,762
Averate CTR: 0.012%
I've gotten 12 conversions, 10 on the old site (http://gradeomagic.weebly.com/), and 2 on the new site. When I switched from the old site to the new site, the old site was getting around 5% conversion rate from adwords traffic. However, the old site only asks for the user's email address to be added to a beta list (though it's below a headline stating the service costs $50/month). The new site leads the user to what looks like a full signup form with a price clearly at the top of the page, and a full name, address, email, etc form. As far as I can tell, adwords traffic is the only traffic that's converted. Adsense and facebook were total wastes of time and money.
I was rather excited about a 5% conversion rate. However, on the new site the conversion rate is more like 1%. It looks like only 16% of the traffic that goes to the homepage makes it to the signup form, and then only 6% of those people convert.
So, the first big question I have is whether I'm going to be able to drive enough conversions for little enough money to make this fly. 1% conversion rate seems pretty low.
Now, on to cost.
I figure I need to have 2-3 workers look at each page of the test. I spent $150 to have a Romanian programmer write a quick flash app to do the actual grading, and put some sample jobs up on Mechanical Turk. I started at $0.10 a page for a 2nd grade math quiz, which several workers remarked seemed like a really good wage. I then tried another job at $0.01, and got reasonable quality work, but there was less satisfaction with the wage.
I figure that an average teacher might have as many as 80 students. This means if they give a 2 page test (single sided, or one double sided page), then this results in 480 pages that need to be graded, if every page is graded 3 times. The total cost of this, assuming I pay workers the lowest wage possible of $0.01, is $4.80. If I put a 2.5x markup on this, this becomes $12.00. Based on feedback from the teacher that sent me the test quizzes, something of this magnitude would take her 2 hours to grade, which translates to an effective $6/hour wage/cost for her.
I can't imagine marking these prices up that much higher and still getting teachers to go for it. However, I'm really concerned that the markup is too low (Tim recommends 8-10x), and having a rock-bottom worker wage doesn't give me much room to play (doubling it to $0.02 throws the numbers totally out of whack).
What do you think? Is this a viable muse? Is it worth continuing to test, or is it best to throw in the towel? What changes would you test before giving up? Or are the numbers just not good enough to continue?
I'd love to hear any and all feedback you have, and I hope the above numbers are useful to others.