Brandon Adcock dot comMy Thoughts, Mostly on Direct Response Marketing

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 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’);
};
?>