It seems like almost everywhere I go on the Internet an advertisement for Virool pops up. I work for a marketing communications agency and the service seemed like a brilliant opportunity, but before I put money into the service, I did an online search for “Is Virool a scam?” I was surprised that there were next to no reviews of the service, so, over a month after using the service, I have decided to write a review of my experience in hopes that you save your money for a better quality advertising service.
Full Detailed Case Study:
I was given a small, $100 budget to put into a Virool campaign for a high-end wine client that my agency represents. I was happy to see that, when I went to add the budget to my Virool account, the service automatically gave me an additional $10.
Setting up my campaign was easy, and I was happy to see that my ad would reach across a variety of platforms: social networks, blogs, mobile, games, and virtual currency API (though I wasn’t sure what the last one was). Once I finished my ad, it almost immediately started to run. I was blown away with how quickly the displays of the ad started to go up. Because of this I quickly became nervous that I had fallen into a scam—the views-to-displays ratio was almost 1:2! As my budget quickly dwindled, I became even more frightened that I had wasted my small budget. In addition, I was also angry that the ad only received three click-throughs to the client’s website.
The next day, after my budget had long run out, I called into the Virool office to speak to a representative about the service to see if they could convince from believing that the service was a scam. The lady I spoke with was very patient, but it was annoying to hear her say that my $100 spend “wasn’t a very big campaign for Virool, not in comparison to the majority of campaigns.” She was able to quickly find an answer to all of my questions, except one: “Why do the YouTube analytics on my video show that all of the views came from Virool.com?”
All she could tell me was that, because the ads were placed through Virool, that this was the only way they would show in the analytics and that I could look at the analytics on the Virool site itself to see where the views had came from. The answer really frustrated me. I knew when I created the campaign report for my client that they would not be happy with this. In addition, the website analytics only showed the source as Virool.com as well!
I then complained to her about the high view percentage (almost 50% of all displays). She quickly had the answer for this inquiry, almost as though it was a question she got 100 times a day. Her answer: “If a user watches over 30 seconds of the video, it counts as a view.” I still
wasn’t happy.
My final complaint, to which she was unable to satisfy me on, was that the click-throughs to the website were extremely low. She looked at my campaign and told me that it was because I had set it up on all display platforms and that if I wanted to increase my views then I should set my campaign to run on blog social media platforms only.
I continued to question her until she felt that her supervisor might better be able to answer my questions. He was able to sooth my fears a bit and even gave me an additional $50 to try running my campaign on social networks only. I said thank you and hung up quickly so that I could test out the service again, hopeful that I had misjudged the service.
The social network ad platform did give me a higher click-through rate. I was happy… for a day. The next day I check my analytics (on the Virool site) only to discover that a “social network” according to Virool is not the type of social network I had assumed. The analytics reported that my video received all of it’s views from a sleazy ”free things” type of website that had millions of ads all over the place (I would go back and tell you the sites name, but it seems the analytics have disappeared). All instagram followers website are not liable to provide with the best services. However, one should always stick to the criteria before hiring one or paying for the followers. Account checking should be done before purchasing the followers of Instagram so you are sure you are getting genuine followers.
I went into the website analytics, of my client’s site, and was able to quickly determine that not only had no sales occurred because of these click-throughs, but none of the click-throughs stayed on the website for longer than 10 seconds. Very frustrating!
A few weeks later I was given the opportunity to use the service again, only this time it was for a product that would appeal to a much younger audience. To make a long story short, this campaign was also a bust and another waste of $100. This time, the “social networking” platform the ad was displayed on was an online game casino. Grr!
My final review of Virool:
I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody unless their only goal was to increase the view count number that displays below the video. None of the views generated through this service seem to be of any value!