Myspace Ads Beta: First Impressions

Posted on September 24th, 2008 in Affiliate Marketing, Myspace, Promotion

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Yesterday, Nickycakes let everyone know that the Myspace Ads self serve platform was up and running.  Today, he had a chance to see it in action for himself, made some money, and learned quite a bit in a short period of time.  Here’s the scoop:

If you’re familiar with Facebook Ads, this is going to be easy for you.

A few general things first.  Myspace has A LOT more users than facebook.  Much wider audience, which means a lot more impressions to go around.  They also have many many more international users.  The ad formats are much larger.  You can choose between a 728×90 banner and a 300×250 box ad.  In these ads, you can draw pretty much whatever you want.  So it’s going to take a little more effort than the 110×80 dinky facebook ads, however, it also means a much higher chance for someone to click your ad.  1% CTR’s should be no problem to get if you have any idea what you’re doing.  

Ok, here’s how to get started making money with myspace ads, step by step, for the complete retard:

1. Sign Up to Affiliate Networks

Most of you have done this already, for those that haven’t, you will need something to advertise.  Unless you already have your own high converting website and product, you should probably get signed up to one of these affiliate networks using the links below.  Yes, these are Nickycakes’ affiliate links, which means if you have any questions about any of this stuff, and you ask for his help on IRC, you’re much more likely to get a real answer if you’re signed up under him.

Advaliant

Ads4Dough

CX Digi

Copeac

Neverblue

CPA Empire

Seriously, go sign up to all of those right now so you can get the approval process going.  If you’re having any trouble with the approval process, CALL THEM during normal business hours, and if that fails then come on IRC and bug Nicky. 

2. Pick Your Offer

Ok, “offer” is misleading.  Unless you already know what works for this demographic and are just porting your facebook campaigns over (not recommended due to much more relaxed approval practices) you’re going to want to pick several offers to test.  Remember that you’re bidding on demographics, not really keywords, so think of what certain demographics would buy.  Ringtones and crush offers for teenagers is a winner obviously.  Dating is always solid over 18, etc.

3. Make Your Ads

Honestly, you may not even need to do this part, as most offers already have pre-made ads (creatives) that you can use, in both the 728×90 and 300×250 sizes that you need.  If you decide to make your own, the sky’s the limit pretty much.  The myspace terms say no celebs, and you’re obviously not going to get nudity approved.  If you’re so inept that you can’t crank out a banner ad in photoshop, or can’t figure out how to steal someone else’s, then it shouldn’t be too expensive to get someone to design some for you (please, someone start an affiliate program for their site/banner design service, thanks).  No animation allowed, and 600k is the size limit for the graphic files.

4. Submit Them To Myspace Ads

If you didn’t already get started, here’s the link to Myspace Ads.  Basically you have to create an ad first and then it will prompt you to sign up for an account.  It is NOT linked with your regular myspace account, so if you’re worried about submitting some shady type ads and getting your precious myspace account banned, worry no longer.  

After you’ve submitted your graphic and named it, you will be prompted for a destination url and demographic targeting.  Please note that there is a bug that isn’t letting prosper202 landing page destination urls through properly, so you’ll want to make a php redirect on your server that redirects to that destination url.  That may sound complicated but it’s not.  You just make a file called, lets say, destination.php in the root of your landing page domain, and in that file put something like:

<?php

header(”Location: http://www.yourlandingpage.com/?t202id=asdfad&t202kw=”);

?>

And use http://www.yourlandingpage.com/destination.php as your destination url in myspace ads.  Hopefully this bug gets fixed soon.

[edit] This bug with p202 urls isn’t affecting everyone.  If myspace lets you submit your url, then you’re good.  It will work fine.  If it rejects the url and says you need a “valid” one then you can use this script.

5. Choose Your Budget

Pretty straightforward.  You choose how much you want to pay per click, and how much you want to spend on your campaign, and what dates you want it to run.  There are a few catches at the moment, though.  First, minimum bid per click is .25.  You will never pay less than .25 per click, period (at least at the time of writing this).  The max budget for the campaign is $10k.  This seems to be for the life of the campaign.  This sucks because you will likely have to re-create an ad after you have spent $10k, which could potentially happen very quickly (in a couple days, if things continue this way for Nicky).  Also, there’s no “forever” option for campaign dates, a minor annoyance.  

6. Payment

This part is straightforward as well.  At the time of writing this, they’re only accepting US advertisers.  This confirms what Americans have known for years: foreigners don’t matter.  Billing seems to happen incrementally.  They bill you once you hit around $200, then $500, then $1000, unsure after that.  Fortunately it’s not like facebook where they gradually raise your daily budget.  These myspace peeps actually seem to know what they’re doing unlike the drunk college intern retards over at facebook.

7. Ad Approval

Here’s where things get juicy.  At least for now, they seem to be approving EVERYTHING.  For long time facebook advertisers, this is AMAZING.  The only thing they deny are trademarked logos and celebrities, it seems.  Want to run ringtones? HAVE FUN BITCHES!  The first ads Nickycakes submitted in the evening weren’t approved until about 18 hours later, but people were reporting 10-20 minute wait times for approvals later in the afternoon today.  Also, the ad approval process is clearly NOT done in order.  Some people’s ads are getting approved way out of order.  There are a few possible explanations for this.  1) They just have a retarded system that selects random ads for them to approve. 2) They may favor ads that have a higher budget, or higher bid per click, or 3) It actually IS in order, and they’re just unsure about certain ads, so they forward them to their manager or whatever.  Either way, it’s pretty much open season at the moment, so get your ads in while you can!  You’ll get an email when your ad gets approved/disapproved, so no need to keep refreshing while you wait.

8. Traffic and Stats!

Ok, if you’re smart, you’re using tracking software such as Prosper202 to see your traffic coming in.  If you don’t like laggy ppc stats, you’re going to HATE myspace ads stats.  They update every few hours with a snapshot of your stats, which is really not usable if you’re testing out a high budget campaign.  Also, the traffic starts VERY slowly and then ramps up if your ad does well.   If you’re not sure how bidding vs CTR works to determine how much traffic you get, then here’s a quick recap, even though this was discussed at great length during the beginning of facebook ads:

Basically, they use the CTR for the ad times the BID you set to figure out, on average, how much they’re going to profit for each impression your ad gets.  For example, if your ad has a .50% CTR, meaning 1 in every 200 people click your ad, and your bid is $0.30, then, on average, myspace knows they will get $0.0015 each time your ad is shown (.50% x .30$ = $.0015).  This means that your CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) is $1.50 ($.0015 x 1000).  So what Myspace does is they look at your CPM for your ad, and compares it to the CPM for everyone else’s ads that’s bidding on the demographic, and whoever has the highest number (the most potential profit for Myspace) wins.  For this reason, if you have an extremely high CTR, you can bid lower per click than your competition and still get all the traffic.  

Unfortunately, at this time, Myspace has made a few mistakes with their bidding system (at least they’re mistakes in Nickycakes’ eyes).  

First, and most importantly, they have set a $.25 minimum bid for all clicks.  This creates an artificial price floor on the traffic.  While, at first, this seems like a great idea for them, it will actually drive away potential advertisers and create a surplus of advertising space which will end up being sold off for lower prices anyway to advertisers from google and such, which means myspace is not only screwing advertisers, but in the long run screwing themselves.  This part is maily for the people running Myspace ads, if they’re reading this:  A user willing to pay $0.10 per click with an ad with a 1% CTR is going to spend $1 per 1000 impressions, whereas a user willing to pay $0.25 per click with an ad with a .3% CTR is only going to spend $0.75 per 1000 impressions.  Do you really want to lose those $1 cpm customers??  Seriously, for a company potentially worth billions of dollars, you figure they could put an undergrad with at least freshman econ classes under his/her belt in charge of these decisions.  Here’s a refresher for you morons:

Second, unlike pretty much every other self serve advertising platform in existance, including google, yahoo, msn, facebook, and even the morons at failure 2nd tier search engines, they don’t adjust your click cost.  This means, even if you have an amazing CTR, you will be charged the FULL PRICE that you bid per click, NO MATTER WHAT.  This is either done out of greed or they just haven’t coded automatic bid adjustment yet.  If it’s greed, it will end up biting them in the ass as advertisers budgets are raped quickly causing them to drop out of the market in frustration.  
 

9) Profit! 

Nickycakes spent about $1k in the last 24 hrs and made back about $2k.  The potential is certainly there if you know what you’re doing, but as mentioned earlier, the $.25 per click minimum is going to keep a lot of potential advertisers money safely on facebook ads.

PS. If you know anyone working at myspace, specifically people working on the ad platform, please let them know about this so that the problems may be fixed and everyone, especially myspace can make a lot more money.

keep it real.

The Day Has Finally Arrived

Posted on September 22nd, 2008 in Uncategorized

As mentioned here back in january, myspace self serve ads are finally here.  Here’s the link.  Go get ‘em kids.

Advaliant Sends Nickycakes a Bathtub Full of Cash

Posted on September 10th, 2008 in Affiliate Marketing, Funny

About a month ago, right before ASE, Nickycakes did a post called 5 Awesome Affiliate Program Rewards You’ll Never See.  One said reward was a bathtub full of cash from Advaliant.  Here’s a picture:

Well, Nickycakes was wrong.  You will see this reward as it just arrived in Cakes’ mailbox today via fedex:

Thanks Peter, Geoff, and the rest.  You guys are awesome.

Still waiting on hydra baseball bat, neverblue bedpan, azoogle giant fake check, and cpaempire turbotax evasion.

Keep it real.

SMX East: Anyone Going?

Posted on September 10th, 2008 in PPC Search

Nickycakes just got a flyer in the mail for SMX East which is a Search Marketing conference from Oct 6th-8th (next month) in NYC. Having never been to a SMX event, the Cakes has no idea what goes on there, what kind of people attend, what the sessions are like etc.

The conference chairperson (the guy who organizes everything) is Danny Sullivan who is the editor in chief at Search Engine Land, and also the guy behind Sphinn.

So, is anyone going, or have you been before, and is it good?

Please comment.

Tracking Wordpress Landing Pages With Prosper202

Posted on September 8th, 2008 in Uncategorized

It’s no secret that many people use wordpress for landing pages.  It’s a very versatile CMS that’s easy for a novice to set up, has many templates, is free, etc.  Realistically, you could have a decent landing page with content up and running in a couple hours with no problem if you’re using wordpress and not too worried about looking very professional.  There’s no reason to go much further into this concept as Nickycakes already laid it out pretty well in his post, Affiliate Product Blogs.  Great, so once you’ve set up your landing page, how do you set up tracking on it?

Nickycakes loves using Prosper202 for tracking any ppc campaigns because it simply does pretty much everything you could possibly ask for in terms of tracking, and it’s completely free.  It doesn’t hurt that the guy who runs it makes himself available almost 24/7 for questions and troubleshooting either!  It’s got great shiny ajax graphs and stuff that make it really visually pleasing to not only see how much cash you’re raking in and what kinda roi you’re getting for each keyword, but have it look goood.  This isn’t going to be a tutorial on how to set up prosper202 on your own hosting, and you can use their hosted solution, tracking202, which is also free, but worries many because the people running it, if they wanted, could potentially steal all your successful campaign data.

Ok, so you have prosper202 set up properly and whatnot, and you want to make a ppc campaign with a wordpress landing page.  Prosper202 makes it easy to use a landing page by simply asking you to paste some javascript code at the bottom of your page.  Unfortunately, with wordpress, you can’t put the javascript in the footer of the page without editing the wordpress template, and even then, the javascript will then be put on ALL the pages on the wordpress page, which means you won’t be able to properly set up a different wordpress post for each of your landding pages in order to split test different copy, etc.  Not ideal to say the least.  Many people use 10 or more nearly identical landing pages on a wordpress site for split testing purposes, sending different traffic sources to different landing pages, etc.  So how can you set up your wordpress with prosper202 to track this properly?

Well, it’s pretty easy with a little php and knowledge of wordpress functions.  Basically what you want to do is tell wordpress to display a different javascript code in the footer of each of your individual wordpress posts.  So after creating your wordpress landing page, you’ll need to know the post number.  When you go to make your campaign in prosper202, you will want to set up your PPC Account, Affiliate Network, Affiliate Campaign, Landing Page (using the individual post url for the lp you just created in wordpress), and text ad.  Then when you go to Get LP Code, p202 will give you a piece of javascript to put on the LP and some PHP code for the outgoing redirect.

To put the javascript on your landing page, you need to edit your wordpress template that you’re using (hopefully you know how to do that) and specifically edit the footer (probably something like footer.php).  You’re going to be adding a line of code right before the closing body tag, </body>.  It will look something like this:

<?php if(is_single(’10′)){echo “<script src=\”http://yourtracking.com/tracking202/static/landing.php?lpip=123\” type=\”text/javascript\”></script>”;} ?>

Please note that you need to change the is_single part to reflect the post number of your landing page.  Also the exact javascript you’re using will have a different url in it, and you will need to put the backslashes before the quotation marks in the javascript code.  Basically all this is doing is telling wordpress, “hey, if someone’s looking at post #10, display this javascript code before the closing body tag.

After you’ve done that, you’ll need to either point all the links to the offer on your landing page to the link that p202 gives you, OR create a php file that you will link to which will redirect the users to the offer.  If you choose to go the php redirect route, which in Nickycakes’ opinion, looks a little better to the customer  (not that much better as most customers willing to buy your affiliate products will be too stupid to know the difference), then you will need to create a file and paste the php code that p202 gives you inside.  In order to keep track of things, make it the php file like 10.php if your post number is 10, paste the code inside, save it in the root of your wordpress page domain, and then your outgoing links from  that landing page will be like http://www.yourlandingpage.com/10.php.

Once that’s all set up properly, you should be good to get your destination urls for your ads from p202 and turn on the traffic.

Hopefully this helps someone, as it took a little while for Nickycakes to figure this out and has proven invaluable for wordpress landing pages for a number of people, but doesn’t seem to be in any p202 documentation.

Note: To track the frontpage as its own landing page, switch the is_single() to is_front_page() in the code for wordpress.

Keep it real.