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Google Adwords

Syntheist

Active member
UPDATED December 21st

  • 60 Day SMA
  • Team experience

Background:
Dash is missing the mainstay of any online marketing department: a data oriented, highly targeted, pay-per-click Google Adwords campaign that will complement other Dash marketing activity by providing an online presence.

Through Adwords we can geo-target sponsorship areas, placing adverts in front of recently engaged, or Dash-aware consumers providing them with a direct opportunity to learn more about Dash.

We will be able to direct traffic to any project funded by the Dash DAO that will benefit from increased online exposure and engagement. We can also hijack competitor or related interest groups using similar methods.

Plan:
We will bring together a team dedicated to running a 3 month, $450k+ Google Adwords Campaign.

These adverts will be targeted towards raising awareness of Dash by directing traffic towards Dash.org, the websites of other proposals that have received funding from the treasury and businesses which have partnered with Dash.

The key messages, copy and graphics will be inline with the vision and strategy laid out by Mathers & Ogilvy. This team will deliver adverts that drive not just website hits, but user adoption through supporting the wider ecosystem of Dash.

With the volume of spending that we are proposing Dash will have access to the benefits of a high tier Adwords account manager and team working with us to create the most successful campaigns possible. (Please see the message from our potential AdWords manager in Appendix 1.)

Our plan is to create separate ad groups and campaigns that target users based on their interests, language, search terms, their countries of origin, their device, and what websites they frequent. Traffic will be sent to various landing pages, depending on search terms and the results of A/B tests.

Every aspect of the campaign will be monitored scientifically, with constant A/B testing to bring the best value for money to the Dash network. This proposal will be run in accordance with the views state in Ryan and Evan’s open letter on marketing: it will focus on general awareness, Dash’s features & use-cases, and business partners.

If successful based on the results of the 3 months of advertising this proposal will seek to become the starting point for the Dash Advertising Dao.

AB Testing/Testing Schedule:
Through a cyclical process of continuous optimisation, we will consistently test the best performing combinations of test variables to drive qualified traffic to Dash.org/proposal landing pages.

Test Variables:
  • Ad variations
  • Landing pages
  • Keywords
  • Bids
  • Ad Placement
  • Ad Type
  • Remarketing
Key Performance Indicators:
  • Traffic
  • CPCs
  • Quality Score
  • Conversion Points/Goals
    • app downloads
    • exchange signups
    • account creation
    • time on site
The Dash Google Adwords campaign will aim to produce the least expensive, most targeted, and most repeatable source of visitors that Dash has access to. While an Adwords campaign is less capable of producing the viral press that a live conference or sponsorship can produce, Adwords is an indispensable tool at delivering consistent, high volumes of extremely targeted traffic, fast

Objective:
Create the architecture and scalable structure for a Dash Adwords campaign that can point high volumes of targeted traffic at the most effective Dash pages for user adoption.

To educate the wider crypto community about Dash's benefits over other cryptocurrencies, and to bring them over to Dash. We will also target groups outside of the crypto community, aiming for their first experience of crypto to make Dash users right from the start.

Target Audience:
As of yet there has been no large scale research on the best audience of driving adopting of Dash, we intend to conduct this research and present comprehensive data to the community so that any future advertising proposals have this information at their disposal.

We will start by targeting existing and recent crypto users. We will expand our reach to include related audiences such as interested in finance and business, we will also work to understand the best way to reach, and convert people with no experience of using cryptocurrencies.

We will keep clear records of the results of these proposals and thus the wider Dash community will be able to make use of our statistics to inform their own advertising strategies.

Each click delivered by Adwords is a living, breathing human, and we expect them to have the same portion of merchants and users that any other advertising source would provide. These will not be fly-by-night users - the goal is to attract Dash users who we can welcome into our community.

Request for Contributions from the Dash Community:
In addition to the list of landing pages already on our testing schedule we plan to work with anyone in the Dash community who has a landing page, promotion, or exclusively Dash-related service. If such a person wishes to have traffic sent to their Dash-related site, we will analyze the site, add any necessary tracking pixels, and work with the site owner to make any necessary improvements, then throw them into the A/B testing mix.

Our goal is to use all Dash community resources at our disposal and turn this proposal into a truly Dash-wide collaboration. We want this Adwords fund to be an opportunity to juice up good promos and great pages that might only be relying on organic traffic at the moment.

As we add landing pages outside of English speaking countries we will be adding translations of adverts to ensure that we can reach a truly worldwide audience.

Team:
Project Manager:
Lina B. Frank
In her role as Network Co-ordinator for the Baltic Nordic Circus Network Lina has experience of managing a decentralised organisation operating across 7 different countries this makes her very well suited to managing this decentralised Dash AdWords team. As director of Circus City she has managed several projects with budgets of ~$300,000, the majority of which was publicly funded and subject to the strictest accounting and auditing policies.


Proposal Owner, Finance, Dash Community Manager:
Edward Rapley (previous proposals: Circus City Sponsorship, Radiolab Advertising)
[email protected]
Dash Forum/Discord: syntheist
Edward has delivered two proposal for Dash and has been working full time as an advocate for Dash since May 2017. He has experience of consulting with the wider community and a record of prompt and accurate reporting on his proposals.

Graphics, Tracking Manager:
Laura Coombs
Working in online marketing since 2009, Laura holds extensive experience within the travel & utilities industries for brands such as Virgin Holidays, Gatwick Airport, and EDF Energy. In these roles, she has dealt with medium to large media budgets ranging from $55k per month to $55k per week, working both in fully autonomous positions and as part of larger digital marketing specialist teams.

Copy Writer:
Zach Goldie
Zach is a copy writer with a background in engineering, he specialises in translating complex technology into clear and effective copy for both websites and adverts. You can read more about his approach to copy writing on his blog many of the points he makes clarify the issues around advertising Dash, which I think makes him the right person to write about Dash.

Execution:
Lina B. Frank will be responsible for the overall planning and evaluation of the project, as well as creating the structures needed for managing a decentralised team. Lina has many years experience of managing geographically dispersed teams of people and has the organisational and personal skills need to deliver this Dash collaboration to the highest professional standard.

Lina comes from the UK cultural sector with sophisticated, tried & tested systems of planning and evaluation. She has developed into a self-proclaimed “impact-junkie” and thrives on good planning which levers measurable, useful results. For this proposal she will create the structure and framework, set out goals and milestones and make team members report on delivery. She will consolidate the findings and prepare evaluation and presentation available to the Dash community.

Edward Rapley will receive the monthly Dash funds and be responsible for exchanging them into USD to fund the AdWords account. He will also be the person reaching out to proposal owners and coordinating all communication with them. In addition he will be responsible for all reporting back to the Dash DAO via the forum, reddit and discord. Laura and Zac will also be training Edward in these aspects of running an Adwords campaign so there will be another person in the Dash community who can bring these skills to benefit Dash.

Shared administrator access will be granted to Laura Coombs and Zac Goldie in order to create a structure for the campaign. The strategy team will be unable to control any funds, yet they will have specific access to everything related to the creation and management of the campaign, including but not limited to: creating campaigns/ ad groups, ad copy A/B tests, country specific groupings, bid adjustments, all the data analytics necessary to create a well-oiled, scalable, efficient Adwords campaign.

Edward Rapley and Laura Coombs will assist in the creation of ads, deployment of tracking pixels and work to expand the structure of the campaign that is created. They will be responsible for managing tests, monitoring bids and daily spends, and in developing graphics and landing pages. Edward will be in charge of community communication, reporting, and in discussing promotions and potential landing pages with the Dash community.

Google Adwords's system has a built- in shared history, so that any user with administrator rights over the account can view all timestamped changes made. This tool will be used to collaborate and to increase team efficiency. If the community would like to promote a particular trusted Dash member to having administrator access on the account, we would welcome the oversight.

The campaign will consist of two main prongs: search and display. Search ads are text-only ads targeted at users who are searching for particular keyword strings, such as: "how to buy dash", "what is the blockchain", "what is bitcoin", "what is crypto", "what is a masternode", "coins with masternodes", etc. These ads would appear primarily on google.com plus a handful of other sites in their search network.

Content ads are text or graphical ads that are displayed to users when they visit a particular website. Content ads can be specifically placed on the most relevant websites such as coinmarketcap.com, or any other site in the Google network. Content ads can also be designed so that they target crypto users on other sites that they visit.

Budget:
Dash price: $580 (to account for potential price corrections this is based on the 60 Day SMA)

$198,338 per month - 338 Dash

Google Adwords costs: $150,000 per month = 260 Dash

Lina B. Frank: $50ph
Laura Coombs: $50ph
Edward Rapley: $50ph

0.08 Dash * full time pro rata = 14 Dash pcm
14 * 3 = 42 Dash
Wages will only be paid for hours worked, this is an hourly rate rather than a monthly salary.

Additional copy Writing and translations: $2,900 per month = 5 Dash

10% contingency = 31 Dash

Proposal fee = 5 Dash

Seed Funding:
There is 60 Dash remaining from the Radiolab Proposal, this will be used to fund some initial adverts and pay wages if the proposal get above 5% positive net votes. Any remaining funds will be used to buffer a fall in the USD value of Dash to help us maintain a budget of $150,000.

Exchange fluctuation contingency:
Lina, Laura and Edward will be paid a fixed amount of Dash as their salaries, based on $50ph when the proposal is launched.

It is essential that the proposal funds maintain a value above $150,000pcm for this reason we have chosen a conservative estimate for the value of Dash over the 3 months. I will explore payment in Dash with the Google high tier team, otherwise Dash will be converted into USD at market rate and will be deposited into Adwords via wire transfer. In the event of a price increase all of the added USD value will be credited to Adwords. For example if the current price of Dash holds at $740 by the end of the first month then upto 367 Dash (inc. 10% contingency) will be converted to USD to fund adverts = $271,580

In the event of a reduction in the value of Dash the 10% contingency fund will be used to cover the difference. If the price falls further the remaining seed funding will be used. The use of the 60 SMA price for Dash gives us the reasonable expectation of being able to maintain $150,000 pcm for the duration of this proposal.

Conclusion:
Everything is up for debate at this stage, so we welcome feedback and involvement from other community members. We are looking to serve Dash in the most effective way possible.
 
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Hello Edward! Nice to meet you. First of all, congrats about this pre-proposal, the composition is very very clear to understand.

Now, I have following questions:

1) What´s your specialty/profession/do for living?

2) Have you ever made a succesfull marketing campaign? (offline or online)

3) How many people you think will reach with this 200k/month campaign? And from that amount of people, how many you think you will track to become Dash users/holders?


The preposal seems good!!
 
Thanks for the response, I'm happy that you feel the pre-proposal is clear.

1) I come from a background in theatre, however since May I've been making my living working full time for Dash as an advocate for user adoption and reaching outside the crypto-sphere to new users, you can take a look at my past proposals here and here.

2) I'm not the person running the campaign, I will be responsible for the funds and leading the interaction with the Dash community. The AdWords manager Laura has been working in online marketing since 2009. I will be trained in running AdWords campaigns so that there is someone else in the Dash community with those skills.

3) The average cost of a click for popular cryptocurrency related terms is around $2 which makes for ~100,000 clicks. We will be tracking everyone of those clicks but no one has yet conducted this kind of campaign for Dash (or any other crypto) so it is impossible to estimate user adoption at this stage. Indeed the whole aim of this proposal is to establish the benchmarks for converting impressions into clicks into adoption.

***APPENDIX 1 MOVED HERE****

There is is character restriction on posts so I had to cut it from the above post.

“The High Tier Brand & Business Development Programme

Our support - Google High Tier Programme - DASH
Google's High Tier programme is a project whereby, every quarter, we provide just a handful of extremely promising customers with personalised support for their online marketing.

Customers who are accepted into our exclusive programme receive a wide range of support from us, with planning, implementing and optimising campaigns, in the form of a competitive marketing effort (entirely directed at marketing activities, with no fees, commissions or any other charges) for an initial period of 3 months, involving no fees or contracts. We will also help to 'put the technical requirements in place' and, if needed, provide useful campaign Betas - Exclusive invites onto bespoke and cutting edge AdWords solutions to ensure our most valued customers are ahead of the curve.

The aim of Google's High Tier programme is to form a collaborative relationship which will get an optimal mix of campaigns up and running as quickly as possible while, at the same time, helping our customers to learn about the benefits of our solutions and how to use them. Throughout the initial 3 months, if campaign restructure and amendments are essential due to new advertising goals or business restructure, this is of course available to Dash.

In A Nutshell = Google will fully support Dash with your marketing strategy & architecture (advise you on the strategy blueprint for your industry based on your marketing goals and the best way to structure the actual AdWords campaign - we can also build this in its entirety for you internally - for free)

You will receive 91 days High Tier support from a team of between 5-8 Googlers comprising of a BDM (me) campaign strategists, campaign architects and creative developers across all Google platforms (YouTube, Search, Display, Gmail, Mobile) Fully integrated. This is all free.”
 
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Can you give us an idea on the number of campaigns Laura has run and the amount of money she has spent in online advertising over the course of her career?
 
Hello Edward, like my brother (Carlos) said, the idea is clear, but dont you think its too high 150k per month on Adwords? I think you can start with a smaller amount and then with your results, you can scale and grow your budget, I mean, I think it would have more chances to pass and its a wonderfull proposal that must be aprooved.

What do u think?
 
I think that the high cost of crypto related clicks calls for a relatively high expenditure, and having a high tier account requires the monthly spend of $150,000+.

The advice I received was very clear that $150k would be the minimum necessary to generate meaningful data.

I'm open to requesting less, what figure would you suggest for the first 3 months?
 
@Syntheist is a FANTASTIC project manager who has a proven record of delivering very high quality projects for Dash. He has set the bar for project accountability and updates and has well earned the trust of the Dash community.

Give him more Dash to do more!
 
Hi Edward,

I'm a bit of a lurker but as this is my actual industry I have registered to provide some feedback.

The good bits:
- Proposal owner has a proven track record of providing accountable projects and updates.
- Digital marketing is an essential part of the marketing mix (especially so for a crypto) this proposal or similar is necessary.
- Detailed proposal that covers a lot of relevant ground and raises key points

The bad bits:
- Team has little to no digital marketing experience, especially with budgets this high
- Reliance on Mathers & Ogilvy / Google High Tier will result in poor accountability & conflicts of interest.
- Budget is too high for this teams first stab at performance marketing.

I'm not sure who has told you that a spend of $150k/month is required to have data confidence? You can have enough insight from a much lower spend to begin with - especially if you focus on a smaller area as a proof of concept.

Questions:

Who will be responsible for the creation of landing pages - do you have a developer or are you planning on using unbounce/instapage/similar?
Who will be responsible for the advert copy - this needs to have strong call to action and be continually A/B tested to optimise CTR.
Who will be responsible for on-site copy - this needs to follow best practices to give strong baseline performance before optimisation (see copyhackers)
Will you be using any rich media (adverts / on page) like HTML5 / video - who will be creating these?
Who will be responsible for data analysis & setup - do you have someone who knows tag manager for example?
How are you getting conversion data from these third parties to adwords - forgive my ignorance here I'm not entirely sure on how all the dash network sites work, is there shared analytics data?
Who will be responsible for CRO - does someone know optimizely/content experiments/similar?

To put this into context, for this budget you'd expect an agency to provide you with an account manager, a ppc manager, a data analyst and a team of people (UX, Dev & Data) to build landing pages who all have significant experience of running campaigns at these budgets.

Thanks,
Ash

p.s: I also missed that you're expecting for 3 people to work full time on this?
 
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I think that the high cost of crypto related clicks calls for a relatively high expenditure, and having a high tier account requires the monthly spend of $150,000+.

The advice I received was very clear that $150k would be the minimum necessary to generate meaningful data.

I'm open to requesting less, what figure would you suggest for the first 3 months?

Hey thanks for your response. Im not either an specialist on the subject, I just though that the budget was a little high for that kind of campaign, but if your advisor told you that $150k was the minimun necessary to be useful then its ok. By what @jimbursch is saying, you are a great project manager so you know what you are doing.

In conclusion, the idea is excellent, I just had that comment about the amount. I would vote for it.

Good luck!
 
I was wondering what timeline you were thinking of with this project? It's not a bad idea to start preparing an advertising campaign early, but in my opinion actual advertising is useless before Evolution is out. We want main stream users not investors and I think making a good first impression on users (with a user friendly Evolution interface) is key.
 
I was wondering what timeline you were thinking of with this project? It's not a bad idea to start preparing an advertising campaign early, but in my opinion actual advertising is useless before Evolution is out. We want main stream users not investors.

The timeline currently depends on the release of the Ogilvy & Mather branding update, this is scheduled for December/January as i understand it.
Given the lack of proposals this month we may put in the proposal and if successful hold the the funds until the rebranding is released.
The logic for conducting this campaign is based on Evan and Ryan's open letter, which states that it is not necessary to wait for the release of Evolution, they (and I) absolutely agree with you that Dash should attract users and not investors.

@AshFrancis Thanks for the detailed feedback and questions, I have updated the pre-proposal to make the team's relevant experience clearer and I hope that this goes some way to addressing the 'bad bits'. Laura has certainly had plenty of relevant experience and has led campaigns of this size before.
I'm going to bring your questions to her and Zach, as they are the ones who will be responsible for much of what you're asking about. It is also clear that we will probably need to take on more people to deal with this campaign at a professional level, if you're interested in being part of it then send me a message on here. My skill, as far as proposals go, is being the one who takes the risks, brings the team together and puts the plan into action by paying the proposal fee.
 
@Syntheist - Great to hear! I rescind the bad bits completely, Laura is clearly capable of holding the campaigns to account and has a really strong background.

I'm not quite sure it justifies full time employment for 3 people nor the 60 day average but I'm sure there is logic behind this. I'd be interested in the execution of the campaign but it looks like it's in capable hands. I do like the idea of integration with Evolution (if you could report on campaigns by dash in wallets that would be fantastic) but I also think having a base level of performance data before Evolution launch would be great.

We believe that the best path forward is engagement of experts / professionals that can skillfully craft, test, measure, and refine a cohesive multi-channel marketing strategy featuring consistent messaging and branding.

I would be up for getting involved but I'm still not as well informed as I could be on all the facets of the crypto (and dash) ecosystem. Once I'm more confident in my knowledge (and how invested I want to be time-wise) I'm sure I'll want to do my part.

I look forward to seeing this go live.

p.s: A separate discussion entirely but once Ogilvy & Mather come back with some sort of playbook all existing marketing efforts should be audited. I also wonder what the time line is on a dedicated marketing team for cohesive advertising / brand position versus somewhat disconnected proposals as it stands.
 
I've added in a line to the budget that makes it clearer that the wages will be paid on an hourly basis rather than as a monthly salary, thus the network will only be paying for full time work if that is what it takes to run the campaign. It also gives us some flexibility in terms of hiring other people on a part time basis.

The logic of using the 60 Day SMA is to account for the possibility of the Dash price dropping, in the past similar price increases (percentage wise) have been followed by 40% reductions in the value of Dash.
 
First off, I think the merits of a well executed advertising campaign are obvious and something like this needs to happen. Coming from the other side as a content person though, I get concerned that too little thought is going into where the advertising conversion are going. I think for an effective campaign is executed, as much or more funds should be directed at a unified content strategy for the ad destination, in conjunction with the ad campaign. I also agree that this doesn't necessarily have to be a wait until Evolution is ready scenario, but at least at that point there is a defined concept and mine for relevant content and information for conversions to engage with.

I also echo some of the concerns over budget, firstly that $150k per month seems too high for a first campaign, and as AsFrancis has pointed out is not necessary to achieve the confidence needed, and that you aren't quite sure about that fact is a slight cause of concern. I think more thought needs to go into that side of things, with perhaps a ramping up of the budget month over month being better than an all out fixed spend from day 1.

Secondly, that a 60 SMA at this point seems excessively cautious and not reflective of a legitimate shouldering of risk on behalf of the project. The example of a 40% crash would still result in a far greater value in USD than you're asking for, and while I see information on what happens if the price falls covered in your contingency, but not much about what happens with a rise in the price of Dash. Where does that money go? Is it perhaps an idea that the campaign could last as long as the funds do, again in combination with a variable monthly spend rather than a fixed one?

Just some thoughts. I don't mean to sound too negative, as I think the idea is sound and some form of it needs to start happening soon, but I think more thought could be put into certain aspects of it.
 
My biggest concern with this proposal is that 150k worth of traffic to dash.org and the websites of other proposal owners will not allow you to track or measure any results or optimize the landing pages in any way since you do not control them. This is not how professional campaigns are run. There are a million variables on a landing page and optimizing for the ones you want is literally what you are paying for when you talk about paying for data.

What variables does this campaign even intend to optimize for? What are your conversion events? From what I can tell the only data you are gathering is clickthrough rate.

I'm sure you can come up with an answer now, but the fact that this was not even a consideration until I brought it up is a huge red flag of inexperience.

I don't mean to come off as negative or unsupportive. I love Dash and for the kind of money it can spend on ads I want to see it get the kind of professional results that come from a career's worth of experience designing and laying out landing pages, sending massive amounts of traffic to them, and optimizing. It does seem like Laura has experience and that's great. But honestly, I don't think anyone I know with experience in this field would ever in their right mind choose to send traffic to pages they do not control and cannot measure. It's throwing money away.

This amount of spend can really move the needle for Dash. These ad campaigns should be in the hands of experienced people with professional strategy.

To give you an idea, my proposal which is live now, is going to be sending traffic to a landing page that I explicitly control. My engineering and design staff have already begun creating it. It is cloud hosted and perfectly scalable. We have defined conversion events as clicks to a wallet download page, clicks to the treasury page, clicks to an exchange to purchase the coin, and email capture. All of these variables we will be tracking through analytics and heatmapping. We will be A/B split testing one variable at a time, starting with the video above the fold. We are starting with a small test budget of $30,000 because it is wasteful to dump a large amount of money into a campaign before testing and optimizing.

Again, I don't mean to come off as negative or unsupportive. I just want to see Dash get professional results from it's ad spend. I honestly would not have even submitted this proposal if someone had already been conducting or proposing to conduct the advertising in this way, but I cannot bear to see this kind of ad campaign and spend in the hands of a team who are not even using a landing page / capturing emails / split testing / etc.
 
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