Brandon Adcock dot comMy Thoughts, Mostly on Direct Response Marketing

Surprisingly, this is going to be my first conference related to internet marketing, and i’m paying for it.  I can’t believe I never got to go to one when I was in-house, but that shows you how tight big companies are with their money.

I am going to be headed to Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas, January 11-13th.  I am thinking I will go down a day early and leave the day after, but I am not sure yet.  I do actually have a full pass for this event, so I will be blogging about most of the sessions, particular Nickycakes’ session which I hear is on how to absorb mypace losses with a shamwow.

Anyone else going?  If you are let me know, we should meet up.  I am sure I will be tweeting info while I am there.  You can follow me on twitter if you want.  I am really looking forward to some of the network parties, I hear it is the place to be.  Copeac, don’t let me down!

Yesterday afternoon I received an email from the Director of Myspace’s new self-serve ad platform, asking if I would be interested in providing feedback on their beta platform. Needless to say, I jumped at the chance considering I’m spending thousands of dollars there, and there are definite changes that can be made to improve it.

We chatted for awhile today and he was a very nice guy. It seems Myspace is genuinely looking for feedback to make their product better, especially in regards to how it compares to Facebook. We spoke for about 45 minutes and these are the major points I gave to him:

• Add an ad scheduling function - would make a key differentiator from Facebook
• Increase session login time - I’m sick of it making me re-login (he said it was set at 15min)
• Examine how they count clicks - they need to not count repeated clicks by a user within seconds of the previous - Myspace currently reports 10-20% more clicks than my analytics report
• CPC’s need to be tied to CTR and not static.  I gave him examples of how Facebook and Google reward high CTRs with lower CPCs.
• Reporting needs to be closer to real time.  There is a too much of a delay in reporting
• Add toggle feature on reporting to show in EST & CST instead of just pacific
• Add ability to delete ads (he said they were already on it)
• Allow ads to be filtered, sorted, and put into groups
• Ability to receive impressions faster - sometimes the initial impression volume Myspace throws at an ad is very small
• Remove 10k ad max spend, more annoying than anything
• Add an option for no end date on an ad
• After unpausing an ad, impressions need to come sooner.  Facebook is within minutes.
• Allow for adding multiple credit cards so they don’t ban your account when it is denied once
• Open up ad platform to advertise in Canada, UK, and Australia (he said they were looking at it)

I threw a lot at him but that was the bulk of it.  He seemed extremely interested in the ad scheduling feature and I even layed out for him how it could look and work.  I really wouldn’t be surprised to see them add this.  It seems that the ability to delete ads is extremely immeninate and should be available soon.  He also discussed with me that they will probably be offering account managers (i.e. available by phone) to the larger spenders.  All in all, I am extremely glad I had the call with him.    They have a good platform so far, but there are a lot of things they could add to make it better.

I think they were asking feedback from their big spenders, so if you get the chance I would do so.  One word of caution though, they do pull up your account, look through it, and talk about it with you.  So if you’re truly running ads you don’t want them to see, then don’t participate in the feedback.

If your site or offer goes down while your paying for traffic, it is never a good thing. Just this weekend crushllc.com, which runs popular Acai offers, went down Friday night. In a situation like this, you need to be able to direct your traffic to another offer. Here is what I am doing to monitor my servers and offers.

I use Montastic for my server monitoring service as it is free and good. When you sign up, make sure to input the domains of your affiliate sites/pages, the domain of your propser account (if you use it, which you should), and then the domain of the offers you’re running.

For notifications, I listed 2 of email addresses (in case 1 was down), and I have it setup to send me a txt message if any of these servers go down. I use AT&T as my wireless provider and they issue each cellphone an email to sms address, for example your#@txt.att.net. What this will do is email that email address, which in turn sent to me as a text message. I am almost certain that every major carrier has this option, just look it up on their website.

When you’re spending thousands daily for advertisements, having a site monitoring service is vital, as Neil can attest.

2 days ago, I logged into my Google MCC and noticed that an old Adwords account of mine, which I had not used in months, suddenly had clicks/charges showing. I thought it was funny so I went into the account to see what had accrued charges, figuring that somehow an old campaign came unpaused. What I found was not the case. Someone had hacked my password (I checked, I had no malware/keyloggers on my computer, nor had I been phished) and created a campaign, disguised to look like my others, for cheap airline tickets. I couldn’t believe it.

To make matters worse, it was a really good campaign. The ad groups were tightly themed around certain airline ticket modifiers, and they had multiple ads using DKI. I was actually rather impressed by the layout/structure of the campaign. Luckily I caught the campaign within a few hours of it going live because the hackers had set a daily budget of 4k.

After researching Adswords accounts being hacked, it apparently seems like a common problem. Not to mention that these campaigns always seem to be airline tickets or ringtones (go figure). I submitted a ticket to Google, they were very response and will void the charges to my account.

Moral of the story is, check your adwords accounts often (even old ones), watch out for malware and adwords phishing sites, and change your password semi-regularly. The damage wasn’t bad, but it could have been much worse.

The other day I published my Facebook cloaking script. Well, I actually use two, since I use each for a different reason. Here is the second one I use, they both cloak the same people, but you can use them in different ways, or on different files. For example, if I was using a jump file, then I would use the script I posted before, but this one below you can just paste into the head of the landing page or if it is Wordpress into the header file or index.php file.

<?
$referrer = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
if (preg_match(”/intern.facebook.com/”,$referrer)) {
header(’Location: http://www.urlforfacebooktosee.com/’);
} elseif (preg_match(”/dev.facebook.com/”,$referrer)) {
header(’Location: http://www.urlforfacebooktosee.com/’);
};
?>

As per my previous post, I said I would post the Facebook cloaking script I use to send the editors(interns) to a different page than I send users. You don’t just use this for risque dating offers, it also works really well for Zip/Email submits. Facebook doesn’t allow you to advertise for those offers, as it requires users to input personal information, so you have to cloak to run them. Same goes for dieting offers, as Facebook has really cracked down on those as well.

I originally got this script from Nickycakes, then I modified it to include the second referral source once editors started to come from intern.facebook.com. This script won’t work every time, as often times editors will input the URL directly to test it, they have caught onto our cloaking, but try submitting it a few times and it will go through. Also, be choosy about what you cloak to, they know you aren’t really advertising for cnn.com or google.com.

<?php
$cloaked_url = "http://www.entercloakedurlhere.com"; // devs go here
$normal_url = "http://www.enteruserurlhere.com"; // everyone else goes here

if(strpos($tracking_ref,”intern.facebook”) || strpos($tracking_ref,”dev.facebook”)){
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: ” . $cloaked_url );
} else {
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: ” . $normal_url );
}
?>

Like I said, this script works for me, I might have to change it some as they become more savvy, but it is good for now (and simple).

If you haven’t heard already, which you should have Myspace launched an in-house advertising network.  The first several days on the network were like a free for all.  I had ads approved that I know were NSFW, but net damn high CTR’s for dating offers.  They have started to crack down in the last several days on the content in the ad, and at least for me, really hard on landing pages.  As many have learned on Facebook, cloaking your landing page from an editor (aka Intern), and sending them to a reputable or less risque site has become standard practice.

Myspace editors do not leave a referring source, like Facebook editors, when they view your landing page, but they do all seem to use the same IP address.  So instead of cloaking based on referral source like I do on Facebook (which I will post my script later), I cloak based on IP address.  This is the code and IP address I have been using to cloak my pages from Myspace editors.  Just paste this at the top of your landing page. It is very simple, but gets the job done, enjoy.

<?php
$visitor = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
if (preg_match(”/216.205.224.64/”,$visitor)) {
header(’Location: http://www.url-you-want-editor-to-see.com’);
};
?>