KalNet Message Board

Do you know the value of getting your brand in front of one person? Can you estimate how much effort is profitable or not? If you are considering advertising, how much do you budget and what do you target for return on that investment?

If you are talking about an established large market like personal computers or budget compact cars, you can look up an industry report or dig through an SEC filing. But what if your market is so specialized that there is no industry report? What if the walled gardens of the establishment hold those numbers as proprietary information? I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.

What if your industry is the paintball industry?

As discussed in the previous two posts, the world of paintball is not one where companies openly share their sales figures and file SEC 10Ks. With this in mind we have to get more creative. And once in a while, other creative people throw us outsiders a bone.

Chattanooga CEP is a mid ranked Professional team entering their fourth year competing at the top tier. Much like in auto racing, CEP is considered a privateer team because, while sponsored by Dye Precision, they are not a factory team for any of the industry companies. That means that each year they have to foot the bill for their event, travel, and practices. At the top, the tournament entries alone come out to nearly $20,000. That doesn’t account for the nearly million paintballs they will shoot this season or the travel expenses to move 12 players plus staff and gear back and forth across the country at least a half dozen times.


While a paintball team budget of under $100,000 pales in comparison to an NBA team budget of $89 million, keep in mind that the ‘pro’ players are making little to no salary and many times have to keep a job while travelling in excess of 30 days a year. Simply put, paintball is not cheap and many times doesn’t cover the bills.

So it is not surprising that at some point, a team would attempt to crowdfund their season. There is a first for everything, and this first goes to Chattanooga CEP.

But what does this have to do with us?

Good question! In our ongoing attempt to bring some measurable metrics to the discussion of emarketing in paintball, CEP has provided us a veritable gold mine of data that actually includes dollar amounts and a reasonable tracking of their exposure.

Before I dive into the numbers, we should be on the same planet regarding assumptions. First and foremost, this is an estimation. Not all their exposure channels provide number of impressions or other counts of exposure. Some of the larger paintball news outlets will provide unaccounted for impressions. Thus the following numbers are estimates on the high side of valuation. But they are valuations which is more than we have had so far.

So without further flourish, the high valuation of an individual impression within paintball emarketing is…

91 cents.

Yep. All 14000 impressions that CEP generated during their month long, ~$13,000 Indiegogo campaign averaged out to returning 91 cents per impression. In terms of conversion rate, they captured 1.19% of those impressions into actual funders(171) for an average funding level of $76.45 per donor.

Comparing back to the first post in this series, that 1.19% conversion still beats out Dye’s .84% that we are using as our measure of effectiveness. Congrats to CEP on a relatively effective campaign.

So what does this all mean?

Another good question! If we conservatively assume that the actual gross value is 10% less, we get a gross of 82 cents per impression. This is a very useful number for general goal setting. If we are planning a crowdfunding campaign, or a product launch of a relatively universal paintball widget(say paintballs), we can use that number to reverse engineer our advertising budget from our revenue goals.

For example: Target Revenue = $100000

Impressions Required @ 1.19% conversion = 100000/.89

=112360 impressions

If we applied this to our high engagement startup from the last post, J4 Paintball, that suggests that their nearly 345k impressions over the past year potentially will convert to nearly $300,000 in gross revenues or roughly 350 units on release. Considering that J4 has been converting at a much higher rate than 1.19% I would venture a bet they will move at least 500 units during the initial debut.

In the end, this is a forecasting tool for individuals interested in entering the paintball market. Being able to at least estimate impression value allows a potential investor or entrepreneur a way to judge their effectiveness or risk compared to other potential investments. While this number changes depending on the good and the target market, CEP’s crowdfunding campaign has provided us with a start just as previously discussed metrics gave us other yardsticks to measure against.

On a personal note, I’d like to congratulate Chattanooga CEP on successfully raising over $13000 to fund their bid for the Paintball Sports Promotions series championship. The grind is hard and the rewards are few and far between. You got my support.