Product seeding ROI calculator

How the calculator works

Product seeding means sending products to creators with no promise of a post. Some post, some don’t. The return depends on how many do, how many people see those posts, and what those views are worth to you. The calculator puts those pieces together in one place.

The inputs

• Kits sent. How many creators you ship to in this campaign.
• Cost per kit. Everything one kit costs you: the product at cost, packaging, inserts and shipping. Use your landed cost, not the retail price.
• Post rate. The share of creators who post about the product. If you’ve run seeding before, use your own number. If not, try a few values and see the range.
• Average views per post. Typical views on one post from the creators you seed. Look at their recent videos, not their follower count.
• Value per 1,000 views. What 1,000 views are worth to you. More on picking this below.
• Sales from codes or links. Revenue you can trace to the campaign through discount codes or affiliate links. Leave it at $0 if you don’t track this.
• Share of posts that tag you. How many posts mention your handle or brand in the caption. The rest show your product without saying so.

The formulas

How to pick a value per 1,000 views

This is the input people argue about, so make it yours. The simplest honest choice is your own paid social CPM: what you pay Meta, TikTok or YouTube for 1,000 impressions in the same audience. If a seeded post reaches the same people an ad would, its views are worth at least that much.

• Use your own ad account. Pull the CPM from your last few campaigns on the same platform.
• Stay conservative. Creator content often performs better than ads, but you don’t need that argument to make the case. A lower number your finance team accepts beats a higher one they question.
• Keep it the same across campaigns. The number matters less than using one number every time, so campaigns compare fairly.

Media value built this way is an estimate, like any earned media value. Our EMV guide explains the trade-offs, and the EMV calculator adds likes, comments and shares if you want them.

Why post rate is the biggest lever

Every kit costs the same whether the creator posts or not. So when the post rate doubles, cost per post halves and media value doubles, with the same budget. The comparison under the calculator shows the same campaign at a 20% and a 40% post rate. That gap is usually bigger than anything you’d get from haggling on shipping or picking a cheaper product.

Post rate goes up when you pick creators who already like your category, confirm the address and the arrival, and follow up kindly when someone goes quiet. Our product seeding page covers how Pozto helps with each of those.

Why tag-only tracking undercounts

Most tracking reads captions. If a creator shows your product but doesn’t tag you, a caption search never finds the post. Your real post rate looks lower than it is, and so does your ROI. The “posts you’d count from tags alone” line shows how big that gap is for your numbers.

Pozto checks the video itself: frames, audio and caption, against photos of your product, and shows the second it appears. See how it works on the untagged product detection page.