Shock Spot [review]
POS:
Solid conceptNEG:
Lack of 'advanced' featuresToday I’m doing a 100% honest review of the new Shock Spot WordPress plugin. So what exactly is Shock Spot? Well its a WordPress plugin that puts clickable ads directly into the content of your sites posts and pages. Well why would you want to do this? Well you have to consider that when you […]
Today I’m doing a 100% honest review of the new Shock Spot WordPress plugin.
So what exactly is Shock Spot? Well its a WordPress plugin that puts clickable ads directly into the content of your sites posts and pages.
Well why would you want to do this? Well you have to consider that when you put an ad or a clickable link (for example a affiliate link / CPA link) on your blog many times people are ‘blind’ to these links. Normally WordPress themes have 2 or 3 column layouts and many themes will have a section on one of the side columns for ads. The problem is that even though your visitors eyes technically see those ads their brains are often blind to them. This is because people are on your site for the content not the ads and their attention is focused on the content, the post or article that got them there in the first place.
[shock_spots id=”9451″]
The solution of course is to put your ad right inside of the content and this is what Shock Spot is designed to do. One thing that is important to point out is that this is not a new concept in any way. Bloggers have know that people tend to get ‘blind’ to all but the content section on a website for a long time. They also learned quite fast that putting their ads directly in line with their content is a very effective way to increase your clicks, sales ,and earnings from your website.
Now when I first heard about this and what it does the first thought I had was: well why dont people just make a banner graphic for an ad and put it in their content and use WordPress to make it clickable? But then I realizes that people don’t for the same I don’t. Because most people are not graphic designers and cant make good looking or attention grabbing banner ads. With ShockSpot you can take any graphic you want, crop it inside of the plugin, add your text and your affiliate or CPA link and quickly have attention grabbing ads right inside of your sites content. Right where your visitors cant help but notice it.
Each ad is composed of a simple graphic, up to 80 characters of text and your link. You can use any graphic on your site or you can upload one that you find from Google or any other source so long as its not copyrighted. Though you cant resize the graphic you can easily crop the graphic so that it is the proper size that is required by Shock Spot. Also I want to note that these ads come in pairs. Your normally have two of them together, one on the left and one on the right. In fact even the editor is designed to let you make two at a time. While having an ad pair not required the system is set up to accommodate having them in pairs. For me personally I say even if you only want one, just create two, with one of them being a variation of the other. Why not have double your chances of getting a click after all? Once you have you ad created you are provided with a short code that you can paste into your post or page content that will then pull in that ad when people view your site.
Ok so as I have said Shock Spot and the concept of having clickable ads inside of your pages content is not a new thing. In fact its an old and proven way to increase the number of ad clicks you get. This is because as I said when you have your ad outside of the content people tend to become ‘blind’ to them since they are focusing their attention on the main content. Because of this I love what Shock Spot was designed to do however it does unfortunately have some serous lacking in functionality and features.
The first thing I noticed is that while you can have up to 80 characters of your own text inside of your ad the call to action inside of the text is not editable.
In the graphic above you can see what I mean. The image is on the left, then the text, with the call to action link under it (the image is clickable as well). I did not see any way to edit that blue linked text. Now to be fair for most applications ‘Read more’ is going to be fine. But there is no reason at all why it needs to be fixed to that. What if I want it to say “Click Here” .. or “Get it Now”? What if someone wants to use Shock Spot on a non English site? Everything else in this plugin is editable so there really is no good reason why this should not be as well.
This plugin is simple to set up. It only takes about 1-2 minutes to create your ad pair. But its simplicity is also a bit of a draw back. There is no advanced features that I would expect to see in an advertising plugin. For example Shock Spots has no tracking at all built into it. It does not count the number of times an ad is show, it does not count the number of times an ad is clicked. There is no statistics at all provided. Another thing is the complete lack of any type of split testing. It would have been really cool the be able to upload multiple ad graphics or multiple texts and have them rotate or be displayed randomly with each page view. This is lacking as well. So while I know Shock Spot is built on a solid concept that has been proven to get results I also think it could have been developed to to a higher standard. Its not that it does not work, because in my testing it worked flawlessly. Its just that it lacks some advanced features I would have liked to have seen.
I actually debated for a long while on if I should approve this plugin or not. Here is what I came up with. It for sure is not perfect, I would have added more features such as click / hit tracking and split testing, but despite these limitations it is very easy to use, worked well and is based on a solid and proven tactic to increase your clicks. Also its priced low enough that it’s going to be very easy to make your money back from the purchase and start making profit from using this plugin. In fact just one or two affiliate sales will cover the cost. So my final word, is it perfect? Not quite. But it is still a solid tactic for getting more clicks that works well and is worth considering for anyone who has a WordPress site.
As always I want my readers to get the best value possible so I have added a custom bonus for anyone who picks up Shock Spot through my link. You will get instant access (inside of JVZoo) to my Facebook Link Post WordPress plugin. This plugin allows you to post large clickable call to action images to any Facebook newsfeed, group or fan page. You also get FREE reseller / white label rights to the plugin.
Click here to get Shock Spot and my bonus plugin with reseller rights. Also if you need a sales page for the bonus plugin feel free to shoot me an email with your receipt ID and I will forward you a pre-made one!
You also get these plugins (personal use only) as an additional bonus from the product vendors!
Click here to get Shock Spot + Bretts special bonus + All of the additional bonuses listed above!
A quick note about the reviews I do on this site. The product vendors give me access to their products for free in order for me to do my review. However I make no promises to them regarding the results of my tests or what I will write in my review. Should you click a link that takes you to a sales page for a paid product for sale this link will be an affiliate link and I will be paid a percentage of the sales price should you decide to invest in it.
About the Author
what about the OTOs?
I dont normally review OTO’s for 2 reasons. 1) I dont have time since I go through the front end in depth. 2) OTO should not be a consideration. You cant buy it right now anyway. You should base your purchase decision on the product alone, not what you may be offered to buy later.
OTO1: Unlimited license for $47 ish…
OTO2: White Label for $87 ish…
Thank You Brett. I understand you dont review OTOs. Does OTO have advanced features like you said it does NOT have Call to action Editable??
I think Shock Spot have limit size on crop tool are very clever to tease audience to explore more…
keep up fantastic reviews.
Brendan
I dont know Brendan if the OTO’s have ‘advanced’ features as I said I did not review them. I believe they are just developer /reseller licenses though.
Nice review Bret. Do you know if it’s mobile responsive?
Thank you.
Given that this becomes a part of your site its going to depend on if your theme is mobile responsive.
Thanks for the review. Decided the good outweighed the bad as it was inexpensive
Ignore OTO’s as I know they are usually available if I really care.
Bought thru your link so looking forward to your Bonuses Looked good
Appreciate the honesty. I hope these guys think about adding some sort of analytics
Thanks for the honest reviews! I come to your site now before I consider purchasing anything. But just to let everyone know, the additional bonuses in your post from the product vendors are for purchasing OTO1. They do offer other bonuses, however, for purchasing the main offer.
Sandy, they gave 2 tiers of bonuses, for the FE offer and then more for the OTO offer. I included the wrong graphic by mistake. Im very sorry for this, it was an honest error. I have updated the graphic to show the correct bonuses you get with the FE offer. Thank you for pointing this out.
What amazes me is…. the Sales Page does NOT have a ‘Shock Spot’ in its content! I had to go past 1min10secs into the video to see a sample. Maybe I haven’t woken up this morning yet, BUT – why bother with this, when we can simply insert an image and text/link into our WP pages. It’s pretty simple to do that. What am I missing? This seems like a waste of money IMO – and the OTO pricings… What The!!
Well of course the sales page does not have a Shock Spot in it, this is for WordPress blogs and the sales page for this is not a WordPress blog. As I said in the review you can for sure insert a graphic and make it a link instead .. if you have the ability / skill to create or edit graphics yourself. As for inserting a text link, that is very unlikely to get clicked. People very rarely click text links because they dont stand out as well as a graphic.
Hey brett I purchase shockspot with you aff link..how can i get your bonuss??Facebook Link Post WordPress plugin??
whats is your email?
It should be available right inside of JVZoo but if its not showing there is a contact link in this sites navigation bar that you can use to email me your receipt ID.
I will not purchase from this pair Radu Hahaianu & Ankur Shukla as there products are not that good and they put them selves first all the time, as for there sales pages are nothing but sales ploys, as i had issues with one of there products months ago and asked for a refund as the sales page that they were promoting was all false info to what the product was, just like you are saying Brett Push Button on there sales page and what you get is not push button, so to me that is false advertising just to get the sale, and as for there money back 100% if not happy well that’s not true neither, as i tried and they would not refund at all and just said i was stealing there product, as i went and explained that the sales page is false and they did not like me saying that at all, As i am just like you Brett and want what i pay for and if the sales page says that well the product should do it…
Well Wayne now you know exactly why I started doing totally honest reviews.
Sure do Brett, Keep up the good work, as i take your reviews before anyone Else’s as it’s honest & gives the bad points and good points that’s what makes a good reviewer as there are not many of them around that explain things the way you do so thanks for doing what you do…
Hi Brett,
I believe that this is my first visit to your blog and I’m certainly glad I found it. I used to enjoy visiting sites that are based around giving honest reviews but the ones that I used to visit regularly stopped updating a while ago. So I’m very glad to have found yours.
I’m glad that you have done such a comprehensive review of Shock Spots – it’s made me glad that I decided not to buy it. The various e-mail promos I saw that hyped it up certainly made it sound attractive, but when going through the sales page and its videos I found myself wondering if I was missing something, because I couldn’t see the point of it. Like you, I thought, “What’s stopping people from creating an ad and placing it in their content manually?”. I wondered if there was some other aspect to the plugin that I was somehow missing, but it seems that I hadn’t missed anything.
I think the key selling point to Shock Spots is, not so much what it does, but rather the time-saving and convenience factors. So far as I can tell, it doesn’t do anything that I (or anyone) couldn’t do easily without it. But for people who are more inexperienced or less ‘techie’, then I can definitely see the appeal. For me, though, the tiny amount of time that it would save me in contrast to doing the same thing manually just isn’t worth it. I think if it had included functions such as ad-rotation or split-testing then this would have made it so much more appealing and useful.
None of this makes it a bad product, though, as you said yourself. If it can make things easier and quicker for someone then it’s ideal.
»Glenn«
Love your transparency Brett! You have a new fan!
Hi Brett, I was wondering if you can clarify something for me? Do the 2 ad’s in the shockspot have to have the same link, or can they be links to 2 different products? All the examples I’ve seen, both the links are the same.
As to people asking why bother with this plugin when you can create your own picture/text ad (I asked myself the same thing), the main advantage I see, is that it’s a short code. So if you put an ad in several places on your site and need to change it in the future, then you only have to do this once in the backend of the plugin.
As to analytics, I assume you can use a link cloaker with this, and if you use one with click recording/analytics, hey presto!
Cheers
No they dont have to be the same link. And yes you can use something like Goo.gl which will have its own built in tracking.
Brett,
I am looking for a product that does just what Shock Spot does. After reading your review I was wondering why don’t you make a product like this with the extra features that you have mentioned. I would buy that.
Also, do you know of any other products out there like Shock Spots if you do not want to code some software. I have several of your products and they always work and do what you say they will do.
Thanks.
I dont make it because Im only one person and I can only type code so fast 🙂 Its very easy to say “Id like to make my own version of that” .. its a lot harder to find the 200-300 hours of time to actually do it.