13
03
2009
In the past, if you tried to contact MySpace about advertising, you’d be lucky to get a response. Then if you did, you probably wouldn’t be considered unless you spent $10k / month or more. Well that’s all changed with MySpace’s introduction of “
MyAds Beta.”
I recently tried out MyAds by running some banners to promote my forums, and here are the results.
The Positive:
- The interface is very easy to use. Just about anyone should be able to easily upload a banner ad and choose the demographic they wish to target. It’s straightforward and intuitive.
- If you’re serious about marketing your website, you probably already have banners made, but MyAds Beta has a really neat tool called “build an ad” that will let you choose an appropriate background image for your banner and write the text that you want it to say. Just like the rest of the interface, it’s simple to use, and even the most novice internet marketers should be able to start up ad campaigns using this.
- Great targeting options. MyAds let’s you choose who will see your ads based on:
Gender
Age
Education
Relationship
Parental Status
And Geotargeting options like: US, Region, State, City, and Zip Code
- Interest targeting is the biggie here. One of the unique things about social media marketing is the fact that these social media sites have so much data about people’s hobbies and interests. This is where these ads excel at reaching niche markets. MyAds allows you to choose who to show ads to based on many different levels of interests like: health, automobiles, fashion, movies, music, poker, etc.
Invalid Click Filtering, The Negative
The test campaign I ran went great except for one glaring downside:
invalid clicks. Google is probably one of the best companies at filtering invalid clicks, and that’s why Google Analytics is such a great tool for measuring traffic. Because of this, I track all of my advertising closely in Google analytics by tagging the URL’s for each ad of each campaign I run.
The problem I encountered was that MyAds was showing about 60% more traffic (clicks) than what I was seeing in Google Analytics. The real traffic I got from MyAds was good – I had good pageview numbers per visitor, and good percentages of user registrations on the forums. In fact, if I wasn’t paying for so many invalid clicks, the traffic was as good as some well targeted Adwords campaigns I’ve run. But due to the invalid clicks, the cpc I really paid was almost double what I had bid.
I emailed MyAds about the issue and got a canned response that basically defended their ad filtering software. I’ve run similar ads in other places including Facebook, and never seen this big of a discrepancy, so I know they have a problem. Hopefully they will get it fixed soon. When they do, MyAds will be a great platform for social media marketing.
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