My idea for the senior thesis project is to create AdPrice.io, a social media marketing reference tool for the internet. This will be a website that marketers can use to quickly view the current Pay Per Click (PPC) and Cost per Thousand Impressions (CPM) for advertisements across the most popular social platforms.
While researching the topic, I used many relevant keywords on Google to try and find the existence of such a tool already online. However, all I came across were social media marketing blog articles, mostly written by advertisement agencies, which sporadically mentioned potentially outdated price figures. There does not seem to be web tool that has been built for this purpose, where the important PPC and CPM numbers for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Youtube, Snapchat, Pintrest, etc. are all easily viewable and updated on a single page. Like I previously mentioned, the closest thing I could find was a cluttered list on an old blog article, written by a social media marketing agency which was trying to sell their services. AdPrice.io would not have ulterior motives, and wouldn’t clutter the webpage, making for a fast and friendly experience.
I have purchased the domain, and am thinking of building the site on a TBD wordpress template. With some templates, it is impossible to tell the site is wordpress. I love working with wordpress, graphic design, and learning about social media marketing (something I do a lot of during my free time), so this project would definitely leverage my skills. Hopefully this project can help me land a dream job of working in content marketing for a startup, and helps me to learn a ton about the subject.
Ideally, I would love the price values to be as updated as possible, but I believe it is impossible to gather real time values. I will do more research, but it does not seem like there are any APIs or bots around that grab the current values, and it would be difficult to create these. Since price values do not change very quickly, I was thinking this site could be more of an educational experience where I update the going rates a few times a week (easily viewable on the top of the page), and then break down the individual nuances and strategies for advertising on each of the platforms on the rest of the page. I could also attach a blog as a separate page, which would help for google rankings. I still need to spend time thinking about the type of content I want on the site, in addition to the actual PPC and CPM’s.
As far as backup plans go, I would make a content strategy and video for my startup Vey.io, but right now I’m confident in AdPrice.io and am currently trying to figure out a logo. Thanks for reading!