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.
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.
