DSC ad results..

My personal executive summary is awareness was substantially raised. Local retail sales of model rocket products, primarilly Estes spiked.

U.S. Rockets had a several times return on its investment and commends the leaders of the effort for that. By my estimate AT and PML had about

10 times the response as I did. I base that partially on the click-through counter Greg Deputy posted.

Also since our motors are illegally banned by NAR and TRA and most people have been enculturated that NAR/TRA is needed, we lost a lot of motor sales to this deal. That is actionable to a severe degree.

$70,000 was grossly excessive for what we got. I said in advance to expect that. The leaders' plan to run magazine ads has potential. I am wondering when that starts and if our firm will benefit at all from that.

Setting aside those issues entirely, what did come out of this that was exceptionally positive was a successful co-op deal that resulted in all forms of rocketry cooperating on a singular goal.

This is an astounding achievement.

FrankUroda is going down in rocket history for this. Now repeat it, but on a more return oriented goal, and heck, why not deregulate and decriminalize rocketry while you're at it. You rock hard!

Just Jerry

We (ROCI) picked up two new members at our last meeting and I have fielded several other enquiries. The local HobbyTown USA has had a lot more interest in rocketry lately. Also, my rocketry related web site,

had a record number of visits last month. Several of them were referred by flyrockets.com.

Mario Perdue NAR #22012 Sr. L2 for email drop the planet

"X-ray-Delta-One, this is Mission Control, two-one-five-six, transmission concluded."

Hangar 11, Inc. has had many new contacts as a DIRECT result of the add / show / flyrockets.com website..

I have seen at least 3 new faces at the last 2 launches I attended... [ admittedly light but the show timing VS the launch dates was not optimal ] Next time can we air the show the week before each of my launch dates????? [ just kidding ]

My launches are done for the season.... 2 of these IN person contacts are now customers. 1 a repeat customer going for L1 already...... The prizes I donated went to 5 people one of which was already a customer.....

I have picked up at least a dozen new customers overall and it brought back a few customers who I had not heard from in a while......

I think it was 82,000 and it was a bargain in my eyes......

All in all I consider it a resounding success and expect to participate in part 2....

As for bringing new blood into the hobby..... how about this one.... my company hosts Christmas Angels on a tree in our cafeteria..... I picked all of the angels off the tree who wanted rockets for Christmas..... SO 3 lucky little boys who wanted a rocket from Santa for Christmas will get one,,,,,,BOTTOM LINE check out the donation group in your area there may be some future rockteers in there...... Tree started with 100 Angels there were about 40 Angels left by the time I got to the tree.....ONLY 7.5% We have work to do.........

Bobby B NAR 79350 L2

membership"

membership"

Actually, the "hit-counters" spiked at commercial air times. Not only that, but web sites can (and this one does) actually track unique IP addresses and domains that hit the site... so unique hits are unique hits.

I don't know that the ad excited "droves" into the hobby, but for the small price, and some of the fast-coordination "firsts" that occurred, I believe it was worth it. I wonder how Estes is doing this this quarter? Do you think they saw Christmas early?

~ Duane Phillips.

Some to track unique IP's, and some don't. And some count each reference to an image on a page as a "hit"...

Even with unique IP tracking, remember that dialup users rarely get the same IP twice!

I think it did stimulate "droves" to think about rockets. Commercials are mindshare tools. In that sense it worked very well. The sell-through was unimpressive.

However the only vendor in a position to benefit from sell-through was Estes. They probably spiked hard. I wonder if Barry will say?

I had dozens of people tell me unsolicited they saw the show when I merely mentioned rockets as I typically do when chatting with folks in stores.

Someone has to hit the road. I invite you to join me.

Jerry

We're still having folks who know various club members who were on the show express interest in coming out to watch and see what it's about.

For us, the timing was bad, as it aired at the end of the flying season

-- right before our last launch. However, we had GOBS of spectators, and they were expressing real interest. And we have folks who want to be there when the spring launches start, to come out and check it out.

This is a long-term effort; I didn't really expect much immediately.

-Kevin

Rarely? Someone who scored higher on the geek quiz than I should tell me the odds of a dialup users ISP (randomly) assigning the same IP twice.

I'll accept some basic assumptions.

As it happens, I just added a counter to my website today.

The information stated that it disallows the same IP number if done CONSECUTIVELY, but not if there are other intervening IP numbers. This is to prevent hitting the 'refresh' button triggering a hit.

David Erbas-White

NaCl wrote:

Hence domains also.

~ Duane Phillips.

There are all kinds of web accounting software that mount far more than "page" counters.

From the looks of some of the stat pages I reviewed about the site, they have software that knows enough to give fairly accurate readings and estimations on unique users.

Some software allows you to group by different levels of subnet masks.

This stuff has been around and being perfected for years. What needs perfection is how to train individuals to understand what the data means, so they ask the right questions.

Among several (but not all) factors, one could look at:

Peak and valley usage amounts and times. IP's in that also hit the stats pages (usually rules out non-new people). IP masks. Click through. Top refferring URLs and Sites. (etc...)

But it is usually not very useful to use strictly page counters.

~ Duane Phillips.

Depends on what you consider the "return" to be. If you mean only immediate new members, the return might be considered small. But that doesn't include those folks who are inspired to get into model rockets and don't immediately join a club. In fact, I'd guess that's how most people will do it -- they'll go buy some Estes kits and start playing around on their own, and eventually many of them will get more serious about the hobby and maybe even move into high power.

There are also intangible benefits such as raising awareness of the hobby.

Our club's flying season ended the day before the first broadcast, so any impact might not be seen for a while.

Brian Elfert

I had more click throughs than Barry. New customer sales have been few and far between.

I sure Estes is killing, despite them not contributing one red cent to anything but themselves lately.

Mike Fisher Binder Design

Barry TUNIK (Estes)

Me too. But dealer additions were brisk. We mostly sell through dealers.

The most common question I get is "when will your motors be NAR certified. My answer is probably never. This is inferred from my observation they will "probably never" follow the law either.

Ah, THAT Barry. If you find out, let us know.

Mike

Any chance it will be rerun in the spring? If DSC has no plans to reair, would the production company be interested in making a version available to local PBS stations during the spring beg-a-thon?

No idea. The PBS thing is a great idea, though!

-Kevin