When doing a sustainability review, you first want to gather pertinent information about the program itself: member count (and active member count, if available) and referral percentages (just add each level to get the total %. For example, if a program has 3 levels at 10%, 3%, and 2%, the total referral % would be 15%)

It's generally a good idea to confirm referral percentages that you see on the front page with the information in the scripts themselves. This can be done easily with programs using CC scripts by typing http://www.name-of-program-here.com/scripts/runner.php into your address bar and hitting enter. Among the information listed will be referral percentages for both cash and point ads. Make note of both for future reference.

Then you'll want to head over to the advertising page. The items you're looking for are ones where members earn cash for clicking - usually only paid email ads and PTCs, but sometimes there will be PTSignup ads as well.

Open a blank notepad or Word document on your computer (no sense in cramping up your hand writing it out on paper (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) ) and copy all advertising options for email ads. Below that, copy all advertising options for PTCs. Then PTSignup. *Note: You can do it in whatever order you want, this is just how I usually do it...* A simplified example version of what you'll have is below:





What you need to do now is find out what the break-even point is for each ad. This is where that referral percentage info comes in handy, because the PO (hopefully) will have tacked that onto the break-even cost of the ad. Here's what my template looks like:




Now you just have to fill in the blanks with the base cost of each ad. Let's take the first email ad option as an example to see how to calculate it. We'll pretend that the total referral percentages are 10%:



$1.375 is what you would put next to "Break-even point" under "1/4 cent to 500 - $1.50"

Let's try the first PTSU ad:



$0.55 is the break-even point for that ad, so you would enter that amount under it, just like with the other example.

Once you've done all the calculations, the template should look like this:




When I'm doing sustainability reviews, I like to break down sustainability by category, as well as giving an overall assessment. The next step is to add up what the PO is selling the ads for, in each category. Using the email ads as an example, it would look something like this:





Then add up the break-evens for the category:





Go through and do this for each category (email ads, PTCs, and PTSUs).

To find how far above or below cost the PO is selling ads, divide the actual cost by the break-even cost:



To find the overall sustainability, simply add the actual cost totals from each category together, do the same with the break-evens for each category, then divide actual by break-even as shown above. The result is the percentage overall.

The benefit to calculating sustainability for each category, instead of just lumping email ads and ptcs together, is that sometimes a PO will undersell in one category and oversell in another, hoping that the overselling will make up for their losses elsewhere. Whether this works is up for debate, but with categorized information, a person can join the program and see what the PO is selling more of and better determine whether the PO is losing or winning their balancing act.


Ads To All

Alot of times you'll see POs selling email ads to all members. These ads usually expire after a certain time instead of after a certain amount of clicks. You're only going to be able to get an estimate of the cost of these ads, which is where knowing how many members are in the program comes in handy.

If the member count AND active member count is listed on the site, I always use the active member count to calculate ads to all. Reason being is that if that many people are active on the site, it is possible that every one of them could click on the ad. So to err on the side of caution, I count them all. However, if only a generic member count is listed, I have found that counting 50% of that number is usually pretty accurate, based on advertising campaigns I've sent out in the past at various programs (both point and cash ads). So if a program is selling ads to all and has a generic member count of 1000, I assume that 500 of those will actually click through before the ad expires.


Points

Points are tricky because every PO has a different idea of what the value of a point is (or should be), and some base their point values on actual income and not a pre-determined amount. If the point value isn't listed on the site (and we're assuming that points can be converted to cash, if not, then they're moot), you'll need to contact the PO and ask what their procedure is and how many points per ad the member gets.


PTP

PTP is also a huge pain. You're probably going to be able to find out what 1000 credits converts to, but I honestly don't think that the PO is going to be able to tell you precisely what those credits are REALLY worth, and thus it's extremely difficult to figure out its sustainability. I usually just make a note that the program has a PTP feature, what the rate is, and that it isn't calculated into the review. And to be honest, I'm not familiar with the inner workings of PTP because that was after my time... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) If someone has a reasonable way to figure it in, please let me know.