Leaving The Day Job

Archive for the ‘advertising’ Category

Adroll is an interesting new ad network I found via Techcrunch this morning. The idea is that Adroll allows groups of similar sites to get together and combine their advertising inventory. This combined inventory is then sold by Adroll for more than the individual sites would be able to get selling their own space.

The best bit as far as I’m concerned though is that it works alongside your existing Adsense advertising. The Adroll widget will show your usual Adsense ads and only replace them if they can get a better price through their own network. It would seem that there’s nothing to lose if you already run Adsense on your site.

I’ve just signed up this morning and created a community for UK Affiliate Blogs. If you fancy joining me, sign up with Adroll and join the community and we’ll see what happens. You might not be able to find the community straight away in which case leave a comment below or contact me through my contact form and I’ll send you an invite by email.

Entrecard has made quite a splash on US-based affiliate and money making blogs but doesn’t seem to have gained much traction amongst UK bloggers. I’ve decided to give it a try.

Entrecard is yet another social networking/blog advertising widget to put in your sidebar. The twist in this case is the fact that it’s tied in to free 125×125 button advertising.

The way it works is this: you create an Entrecard in the form of a 125×125 image and place the Entrecard widget on your site. Other bloggers come along and click on your Entrecard to “drop” theirs. This is the social networking aspect of it, when you log back into Entrecard you can see all the cards that have been dropped on your site. So far, so bog standard.

The fun bit is that you gain a credit every time you go and click on someone else’s Entrecard. You can then exchange these credit for adverts on other sites within the network. Likewise people can exchange their credits for advertising on your site, in which case their 125×125 Entrecard occupies the widget space on your blog for a day.

I’ve tried a few widgets on my site along these lines before but I’m still looking for the one that brings in good traffic and preferably doesn’t slow my site’s load time down to the point that you think you’re back on dial up. The main incentive to try Entrecard is that it’s being used by some of the biggest bloggers on the planet. For example, saving up enough credits can score you a day’s advertising on the mighty John Chow’s blog.

Entrecard is free to join, free to use and easy to install on your site (just one line of Javascript cut-and-pasted). You can try it out and gauge the response yourself in no time at all.

If you decide to join up, or if you already have, drop your Entrecard in my sidebar and I’ll come visit your blog.

Unlike many in the affiliate marketing world I’d had a bit of success with Facebook Ads but I’ve had enough of them now and I’m moving myself into the sceptics’ camp. In my previous posts I’ve written about the ups and downs and given a couple of tips I’d picked up on the way. I thought I had it figured. This week, Facebook decided to pull the rug from underneath me.

First up, they’ve taken to pulling ads without so much as a hint what the problem might be. In fact, they give you a hint as to what the problem almost certainly isn’t. I had one ad pulled because the ad wasn’t representative of the product. Except it was. It said “Get a free Nintendo Wii when you buy a qualifying mobile” and took you to the merchant’s site where the qualifying mobiles are displayed. Apparently this isn’t enough.

A second ad was pulled because “The text and/or image of this ad violates part or all of sections 4, 5, and 6 of Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines.” So I emailed them to find out what was wrong. Apparently if you run an ad for a dating site you have to mention the site name in the ad. Is this in their terms and conditions? No, it isn’t.

Now I don’t mind Facebook having rules. I don’t even mind them having quirky rules for no good reason. But what I do mind is them having secret rules they don’t bother to tell anyone and which require several emails before they’ll even tell you.

The second thing relates to stats. I’ve blogged before about the bizarre stats system which shows you rolling totals for the past 24 hours. There’s no historical data other than the total number of impressions and clicks per day. You can’t see which ad has been getting the clicks. There’s no way to export data for analysis. There’s no indication of how CPC relates to the number of impressions you get. You end up spending all day checking your stats and babysitting your bids just to make sure you aren’t blowing all your budget.

Which brings me to my third point: the daily budget limit which isn’t limited. Half way through one day last week I decided my return on Facebook ads was in danger of falling too low. So I lowered my daily budget to make sure I didn’t end up spending more than I was comfortable with losing if conversions dropped off. I was somewhat surprised therefore that I ended that day exceeding my new budget. Again, I don’t mind too much if a budget can’t be changed during the day but if that’s the case then tell me about it! Don’t just leave me to figure it out after the fact.

All in all I’ve decided that Facebook ads are more trouble than they’re worth. It’s mainly poor execution and Facebook’s characteristic disregard for what anyone thinks of them. They’ve already backpedalled on Beacon, let’s hope they go and rethink the rest of their ad platform too.

Regular readers will be pleased to know this is the last posting I’m doing on Facebook for a while. I never intended to write this much about them. I hope it’s at least been some use to someone.

OK, so that’s a bit of a linkbait post title and I certainly don’t claim to have all the answers or to have made a huge fortune but I am going to detail what’s worked for me so far with Facebook ads. Standard disclaimer stuff: this is what works for me, your mileage may vary etc etc

First off, I think you need a different frame of mind dealing with Facebook ads than with your standard PPC ads. With the likes of Adwords you’re wanting to find people who are searching for a product, ready to buy it with their credit card clasped firmly in their hot little paw. Facebook users, on the other hand, aren’t looking to buy anything, they’re looking at their mate’s wedding photos or attacking someone’s vampire/zombie/whatever. Facebook ads are more about saying “hey, look at this cool product, you might like it” rather than “hey, here’s the thing you’re looking for, now buy it”.

Obviously, Christmas is fast approaching and so the products that are doing well for me are gifts. I’m taking advantage of the demographic targeting on Facebook to put the ads in front of people who I think are likely to buy them as gifts for someone else. So if you were selling kid’s toys for example, you might want to target married people over thirty. Choose a product which is unusual and has an interesting photo. Facebook ads have very little space for text and a picture says a thousand words. Use the title to get attention and gear it towards the audience you’re targeting. Use the ad body to bullet point one or two key features and include a call to action.

As I’ve previously blogged, Facebook ads seem to be hooked up to some kind of random number generator where money is concerned. Unlike Adwords you don’t get told what the minimum bid is, nor do you get any idea of how many impressions you’re likely to get for any given bid. What you do you get though is an estimate of how many people match your chosen demographic profile. If your targeting is too precise you’ll end up with a couple of dozen users in your potential audience; too broad and there’ll be millions of them. I suspect that Facebook some how takes the size of the audience into consideration along with your PPC bid when deciding which ad to show. But I’ll be damned if I can find any rhyme or reason to it!

So how do we choose a bid amount? My technique so far is a fairly unsophisticated method called trial and error. I start a new ad at 10c per click and wait to see what happens. If the ad start rolling merrily away I reduce the bid and see what happens. If it stubbornly refuses to show itself I up the bid. You can change the bid at any time and it seems that that immediately affects your click cost but the decision as to whether your ad actually runs or not seems to happen less often.

As an example, I created an ad this afternoon with a bid of 10c. After half an hour nothing had happened. Impressions stayed on zero. So I went up to 20c, 50c and then, in frustration, a dollar and still nothing happened. I put it back to 50c and left it. An hour or so later I logged back in to see that I’d had several thousand impressions and one click at 22c. I took the bid down to 10c and the ad carried on rolling. So the advice there is not to be in too much of a rush to see the outcome of your bid changes. And conversely, don’t leave a high bid unsupervised as it might suddenly start draining your balance. I’ve also noticed that if you change your daily maximum spend during the day, the change won’t kick in til the following day. So if you hit your max spend by lunchtime you don’t seem to be able to restart your ads until the morning.

This is still a small scale trial and so far my ad spend is only in double figures but at least I’m making a positive return on investment. Whether this is scaleable longer term and to larger amounts remains to be seen. We need to bear in mind that the more targeted our ads the sooner ad fatigue will kick in because we’ll keep showing the same ad to the same people. I think a possible route to success is in creating lots of mini campaigns, tightly targeted, keeping a close eye on ROI and killing them when they stop making steady profits.

I’ve been experimenting with Facebook ads for the last week or so. I’ve had some success but I’ve also been left scratching my head and wondering if I’m an unknowing participant in a very random beta trial.

The basics: you get to create an ad with a tiny headline (25 characters), a little image and a short sentence of copy. You set the maximum CPC and you pick your demographic targeting criteria and you’re off.

The pros: Ads are up and running within minutes. You can get near realtime statistics on impressions and clicks. You can change the max CPC and see an almost instant change in the rate at which your ad is shown.

The demographics targeting is really cool. I’m promoting a gift product and I’ve been able to create separate versions for men who are married, engaged or in a relationship with copy saying respectively “Buy this for your wife” , “Buy this for your fiancee” and “Buy this for your girlfriend”. These targeted ads have had higher click through ratios than non-targeted ones I ran for comparison.

The cons: sheer randomness on the stats. For starters you can view impression and clickthroughs for the last 24 hours, last 7 days or all time. Now, I don’t like this rolling 24 hour window. I want to see stats for today - as in, since midnight. It’s impossible to tell how close I’m getting to hitting my spending limit for the day when I’ve got two days stats rolled in together.

There’s also a daily stats screen which shows total impressions, clicks and costs for each day. This appears to be connected to Facebook’s random number generator. Right now its telling me I had 70-80 clicks per day at a cost of $0 each day. This morning it told me my 74 clicks had cost 91 cents. It’s also showing me a handful of impressions for today which is a different handful to the one in the stats screen in the paragraph above.

Meanwhile, there’s an account page which tells me I’ve been billed $5. It calls itself the Daily Invoices list but there aren’t any invoices to view, download or print which will doubtless cause chaos if the Revenue and Customs stop losing CDs long enough to want to audit my accounts. As yet, there’s nothing showing on my credit card statement so I don’t know if they’ve picked another random number to bill me.

Just to top it all off Facebook have taken a leaf out of Microsoft AdCenter’s book and decided to randomly reject one of my ads. Very helpfully I’m informed that it contravenes one of their terms and conditions but they can’t tell me which. There’s a few reasons why it might have been rejected depending on how pedantic or puritan they were feeling so I sent an email for clarification. The response : “Your ad was rejected by mistake. Sorry for the inconvenience”. No offer to reinstate the ad and no way to do it myself. I have tried recreating the ad and I’ve tried creating a slightly different version of the ad. It lets me do that but the ads don’t run. Meanwhile, several of my other ads, which had been running quite happily, have now stopped. Upping the CPC as high as 50c per click still won’t get them going. This another failing of the Facebook system - there’s no way of seeing what is the minimum CPC required to get your ads running.

All this is intensely annoying as the first day I ran these ads I made 150% ROI albeit on a very small budget.

If Facebook get their act together this could be a really useful ad platform but right now it’s very frustrating. For a one man business it might be possible to muddle through but for a bigger company that needs to have audited accounts the random approach to billing is just going to be a non-starter.

UPDATE: Since I wrote this post I’ve been back and refreshed my Facebook ad stats and my click through count has actually gone down. In theory, this makes some sort of sense since you are looking at the last 24 hours ie I might have had a load of clicks 24 hours ago which are now out of that 24 hour window but it just highlights what a stupid metric it is.

I’ve been experimenting with the new Facebook Ads platform. My ads have been running for a bit over 24 hours and have resulted in 20 clicks and zero sales which has cost me $1.63 (about 77p). The point of this post though isn’t about Facebook ads themselves but about my perceptions of the kind of person who would click my ad.

I’m advertising a digital photo frame which I thought of as being a geeky male gadget so I targeted males 18-35 with interests listed in photography and/or computers. Hardly anyone clicked. So out of curiosity I created a second ad, exactly the same as the first but this time targeted to females of any age who list photography as an interest. Here’s the results after one day:

Click through rate for the ad targeted at women is seven times higher. I can see four possible explanations here:

1. Women are more interested in gadgets than I thought
2. Women are more likely to click ads than men
3. Women are more inclined to “window shop”
4. My dataset is way too small to be drawing conclusions from and I should go back to doing some proper work instead of blogging about my attempts to understand women

If you’re new to Pay Per Click advertising there are free signup bonuses available on both Google and Yahoo.

To get a £30 voucher for Google Adwords visit this Google Adwords voucher offer page and request one. This is from an ad Google are running in the computer trade press at the moment. The voucher can only be used on accounts less than 14 days old.

To get a £60 voucher for a new Yahoo Search Marketing account send me your full name and email address via my contact page.  This is a kind of refer a friend offer so, yes, I get a bonus for referring you but since you love reading my blog you won’t mind lining my pocket a little, will you?

Both are UK only offers as far as I know.

Techcrunch is reporting that Microsoft has bought a share of 1.6% of Facebook for $240 million. The deal values Facebook at a stonking $15 billion.

Microsoft already has the gig selling advertising to Facebook’s US users and this investment will see that deal expanding internationally. Assuming Microsoft are going to tie this to their AdCenter product this might finally give the volume of impressions and clicks that they need to start attracting some serious ad spend away from Google.

Facebook is attractive to advertisers for a number of reasons. Firstly, the sheer number of users is huge. Secondly, Facebook by definition has lots of demographic data about their users making ad targetting much more accurate. (Microsoft already allow AdCenter advertisers to pay a premium to target certain demographics based on users MSN profiles). Thirdly, Facebook stills has its college roots and this late teen-early twenties demoographic is an ideal market for high value shiny gadgets (think iPods, mobile phones etc)

The question though is whether Facebook users will actually click ads. Anecdotal evidence suggests that clickthroughs on social network sites in general is poor. Users are there for the social element not to go shopping.

You also have to ask if this is more evidence of a second dotcom bust approaching. Is Facebook really worth $15 billion?

I’ve been playing around with openads. It’s an incredibly powerful ad delivery platform which is open source and available for the princely sum of zero. The best feature for me though is the ability to target your ads depending on the geographic location of your site’s visitors.

Like most UK affiliates I’m primarily promoting UK merchants to UK customers. With PPC it’s easy to make sure that you’re only bringing in UK visitors but if your SEO is good enough or your content compelling enough you’ll soon have visitors from all over the world. These international visitors will most probably not be able to take advantage of the offers you’re promoting so you won’t be making any money from them.

I recently discovered that a long neglected site of mine was still getting a fair bit of traffic from organic search and that the majority of the visitors were US-based. I do use Adsense on the site which automatically handles showing the right ads to the right international visitors but I also have some image banner space and I wanted to target appropriate ads to those US visitors - they tend not to have much need for Sky TV in the States.

Openads is a PHP/MySQL solution. Installation is relatively straightforward with a wizard which steps you through setting up the database. If you’ve done a Wordpress installation you should probably be OK.

Once you’re logged in things can look a bit daunting. Openads is able to handle the ads for very large networks of sites and so there’s more features there than you need. Openads refers to each site as a publisher and each banner space within that site as a zone. I just set up one site and one zone within it to start with. You tell openads the size of each zone eg 468×60 so it knows which ads can fit in which space. You get a choice of “invocation codes” to paste into the appropriate place on your site as you would for Adsense or any other banner. The choice of code types is a bit confusing but I found IFRAME worked best on my sites.

On the other side of the equation you set up advertisers and the campaigns for each advertiser. I set up Amazon US as an advertiser and just created a default campaign. Then you add one or more banners within the campaign. Banners can be images, text or HTML. I pasted in the HTML that Amazon gave me.

You then assign banners to zones. As I only had one banner and one zone it was a simple case of linking the two together. If you’ve got multiple sites though there are loads of options and permutations for deciding which ads go on which sites.

After setting up a second advertiser of Amazon UK with a UK centric banner it was time do the geotargetting magic. This bit’s not very well documented. You need to download the free GeoLite Country database from Maxmind (get the binary format) and copy it into a directory on your website. Then in the openads geotargetting settings page enter the location of the data file in the ‘MaxMind GeoIP Country Database Location’ box. This should be the filesystem path eg /var/www/html/GeoIP.dat not a web address.

Finally I went back to my Amazon US banner and set a Delivery restriction by selecting ‘Geo - Country’ and picking the USA. Now my site is displaying an Amazon US banner to US visitors and an Amazon UK one to everyone else.

Now this may seem like a lot of work to achieve something relatively minor and you may wonder if its worth bothering given the appallingly low banner clickthrough rates. But openads is much more powerful than just a banner server. The ability to use HTML banners means you can effectively target any kind of content to visitors based on a number of criteria. For example, if you are building a postal mailing list you may wish only to show the sign up form to UK visitors. Or you might want to show adult offers late at night and family friendly ones during the day.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible with openads. I’m sure I’ll find many more features as I play around with it some more. I also haven’t tried integrating it with this blog but I’ll have a go real soon now.