Google Ads - Facebook Ads - Reddit Ads Update Thread

[feedbands]

***update 1/28/2018***

Phase I Proposal Link: https://www.dashcentral.org/p/internet-ads
Phase II Proposal Link: https://www.dashcentral.org/p/dashinformer
(thank you for continuing to fund this campaign)

Thank you to everyone who voted to continue funding this proposal. I am committed to getting Dash back into the top 5.

This is a completely transparent campaign and we will always be 100% open with regards to any statistic including cost per click, cost per conversion, conversion rate, time spent on page, etc.

We also now offer RIO and Goal reporting for other proposal owners. If you'd like to send traffic from your advertising campaign to Dash Informer, we are:

• actively translating to every dominant language on earth (will display automatically)
• actively creating regionally specific instructions on how to buy dash for every country on earth (will also display automatically)
• continually optimizing the Dashinformer page to be more and more effective

And we can offer you:

• Full analytics, including source breakouts, total goals completed, goal breakdown, conversion rates, time spent on page, heatmappting, and more
• See exactly how many people took further action (continued on to download a wallet, go to the proposals, went to an exchange to purchase dash)
• Measure the effectiveness of your ad campaign for accurate ROI reporting to MNOs

Translators Needed
If you are fluent in English and another language, we likely could use your help translating.

PM on the forum or message @feedbands on Discord to setup Goal Reporting or offer language translation help.
***

Landing page
A landing page has been created. We will not divulge it just yet as we are putting the finishing touches on it but we will share it with the community within 48 hours. From this page we are optimizing for the following conversions:

• clicks to wallet download page
• clicks to exchanges to purchase dash
• clicks to proposal page
• clicks to pre-proposal forum
• clicks to dash reddit / twitter
• email form submission
• clicks to headlines detailing recent and important Dash news on third party sites

Google Campaign
We have created 23 campaigns containing a total of 342 ad groups targeting 8900 keywords. Campaigns are broken down by device (desktop vs mobile vs tablet) and broken down by country. To begin we are targeting only english speaking countries, which include US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK, Ireland and South Africa. In the future we can hire translators to translate our landing page into additional languages and select appropriate exchanges for the respective countries.

We have set the bids at 10 cents per click for every keyword and will be scaling up gradually each day to figure out exactly how low our bids can be while still spending our entire budget. This will deliver the most clicks for the budget.

Facebook Campaign
Ready to go. Targeting english speakers in the following countries:
United Arab Emirates, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Bolivia, Canada, Switzerland, Colombia, Cyprus, Germany, Estonia, Spain, Finland, United Kingdom, Georgia, Croatia, Ireland, Israel, Cambodia, South Korea, Lithuania, Latvia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Romania, Serbia, Singapore, Slovenia, Slovakia, United States, Vietnam, Kosovo: Kosovo (+25 mi) Kosovo, South Africa

This is great because facebook allows us to target english speakers in non-english speaking countries very easily.

Targeting interests:
Bitcoin, Virtual currency, Ico, Digital wallet, Ripple (payment protocol), Cryptocurrency, Digital currency, Blockchain.info, Litecoin, Bitcoin network, Ethereum or Coinbase

A lot of the altcoins unfortunately were not available to target based on interest on facebook. Nevertheless our audience is 20 million and Google and Reddit allow us to capture granular altcoin targeting.

Reddit Campaign:
Targeting 20 of the top altcoin subreddits. Ready to go. To minimize risk of FUD, comments on ads have been disabled.

Tools installed out of the gate:

• A/B testing. First variable is video at top of page. 4 variants being tested
• Heatmapping. Full report will be issued to the Network at the end of the experiment
• Full analytics, of course
• Conversion tracking and optimization
• Remarketing tracking. We'll build the audience now and remarket with Dash updates, news and milestones.
• Mailchimp: capturing emails of people interested in Dash updates will add further value to the spend of this campaign.

There is a lot going on under the hood and this is a very exciting campaign to be working on both in terms of the size and scope. There is a lot more to it all that I haven't mentioned here but this will give you a general sense.

Ads across all campaigns are expected to hit full throttle in 48 hours.

It's the night before Christmas, Dash. Happy new year!

 

[feedbands]

Google ads are running. We ramped from .10 per click to .25 per click to .50 per click now and we believe we will be able to spend the entire budget at .50 per click.

Excellent data is coming in.

Landing page is Dashinformer.com

Please do not visit it too much as it will skew our data. Also, note that when you do visit, it will randomy send you to one of four versions of our homepage.

Ideally you'd visit it once if you're curious and then give it a closer look after the experiment finishes on the 14th. If you plan on spending a lot of time on the page you can also let me know and I can whitelist you on the analytics so as not to count your data.

Facebook and Reddit begins deploying tomorrow.

 

[Ftoole]

Looks nice. That is kind of you to help out Jerry.

 

[feedbands]

Ramping up. So far we are over a 5% conversion rate for traffic hitting the site and clicking away to the wallet download / treasury / exchanges.

We can definitely get the conversion rate higher. Although our facebook campaign is targeting worldwide, we are finding the bounce rate exceedingly high for approximately 200 non english speaking countries, although we are only targeting english speakers.

We have changed our targeting on facebook to include only countries with a high percentage of english speakers (US, UK, norway, sweden, denmark, canada, australia, new zealand, ireland, india).

Our hope is that this will reduce the bounce rate and increase the conversion rate.

We'll keep you posted. Initial results are extremely encouraging. We are successfully pulling people interested in cryptocurrency from all corners of the internet and world and exposing them to Dash. Average time on page is several minutes.

Up up and away.

 

[feedbands]

Enough conversion data has now come in that we can turn on google's conversion optimizer and facebook's conversion optimizer. For folks who don't know, this is essentially their respective AI that intelligently starts showing the ads to people they know will result in a conversion, which in our case is anyone engaged to the point where they click away, be it to the exchanges, the treasury, the forum, the reddit, the twitter, the wallet download page, the recent news, etc.

This should have a two-fold compounding benefit. First, we will get more conversions, more people going to the exchanges, the treasury, the wallet download page, etc. The second benefit is that the quality of the traffic will increase across the board, and google and facebook use machine learning and a zillion data points to crunch the exact type of person most likely to take this action and start sending only those people.

 

[feedbands]

We are getting many daily email submissions already, even with our small pre-ramp test budget.

The email submission form is a double-opt-in so there no chance of anyone getting added to the list who did not click the link in their email to confirm.

Dash this is very exciting.

 

[feedbands]

Here is a snapshop of our Goal conversions between yesterday and today:

And here is a snapshot of our Google Adwords conversion costs and rates:

Again folks this is just for two days at the pre-ramp experimental budget. This does not in anyway demonstrate the full force of the campaign. Just a quick glance of the progress I am making.

If you have experience running campaigns then you know we are looking at very good conversion rates

 

[dashdisciple]

This is how it's done. Congratulations and thank you, @feedbands .

Looking forward to seeing a much bigger budget on this. This is the type of proposal that will keep Dash in the top 3-5. And if Dash isn't up there, it's going to get left behind and lost in all the noise. Dash's fiat price might not be extraordinarily meaningful, but its market rank is.

Can't wait to see Dash ads on every single crypto subreddit.

 

[feedbands]

The reddit is going to take some maneuvering. Initial ads got rejected:

This email is to inform you that your creative Bitcoin has been rejected under campaign Bitcoin for the following reason:

Reddit does not permit the promotion or advertisement of single securities, other tradeable financial assets, or financial advising. This includes, but is not limited to: websites that promote cryptocurrency pre-sales, token/ICO sales and websites that offer financial advice.

To edit your creative, please navigate to your dashboard at https://ads.reddit.com/dashboard and click the pencil icon next to your creative name. To edit your campaign and targeting, click on the pencil icon next to your campaign name.

Once you have made changes to your creative, you will need to resubmit your ad for review. This can take up to 1 business day. Please note that ads submitted over the weekend will not be reviewed until the following Monday.

If you have any questions about why your ad was rejected, please reach out to our team through this channel: https://www.reddithelp.com/en/submit-request/advertising-help and select 'Ad Approvals/Rejections' as the topic. Please do not reply directly to this e-mail, as our team is unable to triage and resolve tickets via e-mail.

Thank you,
The Reddit team


That said, I am going to keep at it. We're adding the standard disclaimers about it not being financial advice, and of course it isn't promoting a pre-sale or ICO. But it may be hard to get around "Reddit does not permit the promotion or advertisement of single securities, other tradeable financial assets"

We're going to make some tweeks to the verbiage and add the standard "this is not financial advice" to the landing page, but if that doesn't work, we will need to create a new landing page that somehow would not be considered an advertisement for tradable financial assets.

 

[feedbands]

That said, facebook and google are going off, and I've been able to successfully increase our conversion rate every day by a percent or two.

Yesterday overall conversion rate was 6.9%

Today overall conversion rate is up to 8.25% and we've done almost as many conversions and it's only 9AM

Also in the last 3 days we've done about 10,000 page views across 8,000 unique users.

Average time on page is a whopping 3 minutes (this is good) and bounce rate is below 90% (also very good for ppc campaigns)

 

[feedbands]

While waiting to hear back from Reddit's approval team (their contact form is currently broken), we've gone ahead and activated sidebar ads via google for the following channels:

If you check reddit out, all sorts of coins and icos are advertising on this sidebar position so we will be in a sea of many and hopefully we can work with reddit to get those top ads going.

 

[dashdisciple]

Go @feedbands. You are the 2018 MVP in the making.

And a good lesson to all - rules CHANGE on a dime. If crypto advertising is available NOW, buy it NOW. Waiting to advertise until Evolution or for any other reason is naive.

 

[feedbands]

Go @feedbands. You are the 2018 MVP in the making.

And a good lesson to all - rules CHANGE on a dime. If crypto advertising is available NOW, buy it NOW. Waiting to advertise until Evolution or for any other reason is naive.

and that is exactly why we are building the remarketing list on a third party service that is not facebook or google

 

[feedbands]

Ads are successfully delivering across all major crypto channels on reddit via google on the right sidebar.

 

[feedbands]

Ads are successfully delivering across all major crypto keywords on youtube.

 

[feedbands]

1.8 million impressions on reddit today. now optimizing for clickthrough rate.

 

[feedbands]

**important update**

At the request of several MNOs, Jerry Banfield's tutorial videos have been completely removed from all versions of the landing page and his videos will never be used again. They've been replaced with equivalent tutorial videos.

 

[feedbands]

Ok folks, we have a Reddit update and good news. If you want the quick update, they've approved our ad to run across crypto channels on the condition that the ad points to the /r/Dashpay subreddit. Unfortunately they won't allow us to send traffic directly to the dashinformer landing page, but there is a silver lining as I'm sure our reddit subscribers are about to start seeing a sharp increase. We have 17903 reddit subscribers at the time of writing this.

The long story for those interested:
We've been going back and forth with Reddit for the last few days. At first they wouldn't allow our ads on the basis that we're advertising a tradable security. On this basis, they have made a decision not to allow ads for cryptos. So I pointed them towards various crypto ads that were running like Beetoken and some bitcoin fork. They told me they are taking those ads down, but then told me we can still run the ads, it just needs to point to the Dash subreddit.

So, the official reddit ads are starting today. And of course, we'e been advertising on reddit since yesterday via Google. We did 2.2 million impressions on reddit yesterday alone and will probably see more than that today, not including the "official" reddit ad at the top that will start running now.


We've also begun rolling ads out on TechCrunch, CNBC, Gizmodo, and Yahoo Finance.

We've also begun deploying a remarketing campaign as our remarketing list has already grown to 10,000 people. For folks that don't know, this is a campaign that specifically targets folks who have already visited the landing page. Bringing people back to the page for a second visit always has a much higher conversion rate across the board, as it is the second time they're being exposed to this info. So far our remarketing campaign is performing well.

I'll keep you posted as updates come in. Managing this campaign has quickly become a second full time job.

 

[feedbands]

Just going to post this here for the weekend:

 

[feedbands]

The ads went completely ballistic today:

7.9 million impressions. 19,000 clicks. $10,000+ spend. 919 conversions. That's today alone. And Google alone. Not including facebook or native reddit.

It took up until today to spend 6k intelligently. And then we were able to spend over 10k today. We're at the point now where I can probably deploy 20k tomorrow and exhaust the budget. We'll see what happens. I will never make astronomical bids just to spend. All bids will always remain reasonable so we are getting value for our money. In this way it can sometimes be a challenge to scale a campaign effectively. But this campaign has plenty of room to grow without doing anything nonsensical.

Also note that we now recommend Uphold and Wall of Coins as the first options to buy Dash, and we sent over 100 people there today.

Additionally our remarketing list now has over 25,000 people:

 

[dashdisciple]

You have unlocked (professionally and in an organized, responsible manner) Dash's path back to the top 3.

Get more budget, fast. This deserves it. There's $8.5M/mo now and Ripple and all the other crap coins are not holding back on their spends. Forget the temporary prices - those top ranking coins that are putting the pedal to the metal are sucking talent, news, investment, users, traction, integrations, merchants out from under us.

 

[jimbursch]

Nice to see our paid ad experts (@dashdisciple, @feedbands) on the same page!

Can you put a link to the proposal in the initial post so that we can refresh our memories of the proposal as we track the updates?

How do you feel about assembling an advisory board of trusted/established Dash community members to help oversee your project and help you secure greater funding? Maybe consider using an escrow service. Personally I would like to see a good chunk of the monthly budget used in this manner, as long as a system of solid accountability is in place.

 

[jimbursch]

Also, @marketingmonk (Cris Coney) must be pleased!

 

[feedbands]

Ad budget has been depleted.

We've saved enough funds to continue running remarketing through the end of the month, but ads at scale have stopped deploying as of this morning.

Will add links to proposals. Expect a comprehensive report shortly.

 

[feedbands]

Proposal link has been added to the top of the first post, but I'll put it down here too:

https://www.dashcentral.org/p/internet-ads

 

[feedbands]

One thing is very clear from our heatmapping analysis, the number one thing people want to do when they visit Dash Informer is buy Dash:

The results were surprisingly dramatic.

 

[feedbands]

In order to address the chief interest of our userbase, which is buying dash, my engineering team is already working on regionally specific dynamic insertion of the How To Buy panel. We will be inserting a country-specific panel based on where the user is located. Buying Dash in India is different vs. in the US, vs. in Europe. We will configure a panel for each country, working top down from the list of countries our visitors are from, which is posted below. The panel will no longer read How To Buy Dash but rather, How To Buy Dash in India or How To Buy Dash in South Africa.

Luckily, Bittrex serves just about every country, so as long as they are accepting new accounts we just need to get our users some bitcoin. Can't be too hard right?

There were our top ten sources based on the campaign, so we would start with addressing these countries specifically in How to Buy Dash:

 

[feedbands]

India really wants to buy dash guys

 

[feedbands]

To follow up yes I think accountability and transparency is important. Ad Spends should be verified. In terms of an advisory board, the entire Dash network is my advisory board and I've been incorporating their feedback rapidly throughout the campaign. A lot of people sounded the alarms to take down the videos down of Jerry Banfield . done. A few of people cried foul that Coinbase was the first recommendation for a portal into Dash, so we added Uphold, WallOfCoins and Bitfinex. One guy said that we should be inserting our own affiliate links to track signups at exchanges. This thought had of course occurred to me but I decided against it out of conflict of interest. Perhaps we could put Core affiliate links in there, or if I did use my own, that money could be cycled back into the ad campaign. I feel the affiliate account handling is really more a decision to reach with consensus among the network.

All that being said, I do have a certain way that I like to work, and people I like to work with, and can move with tremendous speed and efficiency in the current format. We can deploy ads at scale, we can verify the spend, and we can continue to be open and receptive to feedback from the Dash community.

 

[Ftoole]

I would think if we could have affiliate links for this project. Then the funds generated by those sign-ups are just added to the budget. Then thier wouldn’t be a real conflict of interest with it. Also then this project could partially pay for itself over the long term. We have a large budget yes but if affiliate link bring in 1k the 1k that we can have for something else in the budget. Just my 2 duffs.

I think this is real cool and your doing a good job.