This post is about this proposal that was approved to do a Facebook ad campaign in UK, Spain and Venezuela:
https://www.dashcentral.org/p/mrktng-feb-2018
The campaign was ready to be launched when Facebook decided to ban crypto ads. We had some parts already approved by FB and loaded in the platform. I made the decision not to go ahead and cancel because when we talked with FB they could not even guarantee that we would be able to keep it live until it ended.
Also, the biggest reason why I think it makes sense for us to do some advertising is to learn about our potential audience. The impressions have value, but that is not everything, specially with a limited budget like ours. Without some continuity it is not possible to obtain the full value of that, so I preferred not to spend the money and cancel.
We then started to adapt the campaign to the Google ecosystem. Google provides different information about the audience than FB does, so we had to build it again.
It is important to note that the Google platform has three very different parts:
-Youtube
-Display ads (Google manages the banners in a big percentage of the internet)
-Search
The plan is to focus on video (60%), with some love for display (35%) and only marginal attention to search (5%). Similar percentages of investment apply to the country split, with slightly less than two thirds in the UK, around half of that in Spain and the rest in Venezuela.
The goal of the campaign is double:
1. To increase Dash brand awareness in the selected audiences. The user cycle starts with awareness, to be followed by consideration, then usage and then repetition. We are targeting people who are only barely aware of Dash. We know that from some market research we did in the context of the branding project.
We will be measuring changes in brand awareness, ad recall and brand intent with a tool that Google offers once you reach certain volume of ads. It is called Brand Lift. It keeps a control group of your selected audience unexposed to your ads. Then they poll the people who have been exposed to your ads and those in the control group. With this we expect to get data on how effective (and expensive) is to raise brand awareness only with ads
2. Another part of the plan is to expose those groups to different messages and formats so we can also learn what works best with who. Those who click on any ad get redirected to a landing page in a subdomain of dash.org. The ads they will be exposed after that are different because then what they need to reinforce the message.
The audience of the campaign is people with some interest in crypto.
The size of the audience per country is:
The expected cost is of the campaign is:
We will start getting more data in a few days, but preliminary data from the first hours of the campaign shows that Venezuelans are reacting much more than British and Spaniards.
In order to be able to use Brand Lift we can’t change parameters in a couple of weeks. Then we’ll start adjusting so we can optimize the remainder of the campaign.
The expected duration is around four weeks.
Once it is finished we’ll publish full details about the campaign planning phase (not convenient at the moment because someone could try to mimic what we do and make our efforts less efficient), along with the analysis of the results.
As almost everyone knows, Google has recently banned crypto too (Twitter just did the same, by the way). In this case we didn’t cancel because this campaign was already paid to Google (and we could not recover the money). Also, the ban doesn’t go into effect until June, so even if we don’t have further continuity, we will at least have some information from this campaign.
It is unlikely that we’ll do more campaigns like this one in the near future. There are other smaller platforms, but they provide fewer tools to learn about the audience and we can’t discard that some of them will not ban crypto too. Also, the treasury budget is much smaller now than it was a couple months ago. We only decided to start doing ads when everything else was covered. That is not the case now, so we will not request more funds for the time being.
As for the funds from the proposal approved last month, we’re working on a new plan for that because without continuity I don’t think it makes sense to just spend it in a few more campaigns like if nothing had changed. I will publish details soon.
https://www.dashcentral.org/p/mrktng-feb-2018
The campaign was ready to be launched when Facebook decided to ban crypto ads. We had some parts already approved by FB and loaded in the platform. I made the decision not to go ahead and cancel because when we talked with FB they could not even guarantee that we would be able to keep it live until it ended.
Also, the biggest reason why I think it makes sense for us to do some advertising is to learn about our potential audience. The impressions have value, but that is not everything, specially with a limited budget like ours. Without some continuity it is not possible to obtain the full value of that, so I preferred not to spend the money and cancel.
We then started to adapt the campaign to the Google ecosystem. Google provides different information about the audience than FB does, so we had to build it again.
It is important to note that the Google platform has three very different parts:
-Youtube
-Display ads (Google manages the banners in a big percentage of the internet)
-Search
The plan is to focus on video (60%), with some love for display (35%) and only marginal attention to search (5%). Similar percentages of investment apply to the country split, with slightly less than two thirds in the UK, around half of that in Spain and the rest in Venezuela.
The goal of the campaign is double:
1. To increase Dash brand awareness in the selected audiences. The user cycle starts with awareness, to be followed by consideration, then usage and then repetition. We are targeting people who are only barely aware of Dash. We know that from some market research we did in the context of the branding project.
We will be measuring changes in brand awareness, ad recall and brand intent with a tool that Google offers once you reach certain volume of ads. It is called Brand Lift. It keeps a control group of your selected audience unexposed to your ads. Then they poll the people who have been exposed to your ads and those in the control group. With this we expect to get data on how effective (and expensive) is to raise brand awareness only with ads
2. Another part of the plan is to expose those groups to different messages and formats so we can also learn what works best with who. Those who click on any ad get redirected to a landing page in a subdomain of dash.org. The ads they will be exposed after that are different because then what they need to reinforce the message.
The audience of the campaign is people with some interest in crypto.
The size of the audience per country is:
The expected cost is of the campaign is:
We will start getting more data in a few days, but preliminary data from the first hours of the campaign shows that Venezuelans are reacting much more than British and Spaniards.
In order to be able to use Brand Lift we can’t change parameters in a couple of weeks. Then we’ll start adjusting so we can optimize the remainder of the campaign.
The expected duration is around four weeks.
Once it is finished we’ll publish full details about the campaign planning phase (not convenient at the moment because someone could try to mimic what we do and make our efforts less efficient), along with the analysis of the results.
As almost everyone knows, Google has recently banned crypto too (Twitter just did the same, by the way). In this case we didn’t cancel because this campaign was already paid to Google (and we could not recover the money). Also, the ban doesn’t go into effect until June, so even if we don’t have further continuity, we will at least have some information from this campaign.
It is unlikely that we’ll do more campaigns like this one in the near future. There are other smaller platforms, but they provide fewer tools to learn about the audience and we can’t discard that some of them will not ban crypto too. Also, the treasury budget is much smaller now than it was a couple months ago. We only decided to start doing ads when everything else was covered. That is not the case now, so we will not request more funds for the time being.
As for the funds from the proposal approved last month, we’re working on a new plan for that because without continuity I don’t think it makes sense to just spend it in a few more campaigns like if nothing had changed. I will publish details soon.