Just yesterday I picked up on a tweet from lenstrom that MySpace Ads went live, at least in the beta version, so I though I’d head over there, sign up and throw $50 their way to see if I could get some action. As of this post unfortunately my ads haven’t been approved yet, even though they’ve been sitting in the que for about 22 hours. So, even though I don’t have any conversion or money making data yet, I can give you a walk through of the system and offer some opinions.
When I get my ads approved and get some data I’ll report back to let you know how it went.
It’s pretty easy to sign up with MySpace ads and you don’t even have to have a MySpace account to do so. Just put in all your personal data, a valid credit card and then you go and set up your ads. MySpace is different than Facebook Ads in that you have 2 choices of ad sizes, either a 300 x 250 block or a large 728 x 90 pixel banner of which you can either design right in the MySpace interface (you can add text and your own images), make your own or do what I did and just use creatives from whatever offer you are promoting.
If you’d like, you can target your ad before or after you actually create it. At this point the demographic data available to do your targeting is very limited. As you can see below they’ve left out at least one important choice in the game console category. They’ve included everything but the Wii (I forgot Wii was a Nintendo product. However, you can select it seperately on Facebook. Thanks to WordVixen for pointing out the mistake):
Also lacking in some demographic areas I was exploring were only 8 brand name video games to choose from, no Christian category under music, only 29 authors listed in the book category and the health & fitness category only has 2 options – working out and yoga, lame. Hopefully this is just what they’re offering during beta and the category choices will be expanded. Right now Facebook Ads offers much better targeting.
Also, you will definitely want to set your age demographic appropriately to avoid maybe trying to sell car parts to 13-year-old-girls or some such market that will waste your ad budget since MySpace is notorious for worthless ad traffic. How many 13-year-old have credit cards?
After you create your ad, target it and add your destination url, you then set your campaign budget and it looks like you can set a total amount to spend on a campaign (hopefully you can change that if your campaign is doing well) and choose your bid amount, as long as it’s 25 cents or above.
That’s another flub with MySpace Ads here is the 25 cent minimum bid. Come on guys, you can’t expect that to fly very long on an unproven ad platform with no conversion data yet. It remains to be seen if actual cost per click will be at 25 cents or lower, but that’s ridiculous, not being able to lower bids to 10 or 15 cents to get a better ROI is just crazy. This is basically a content platform and if I were paying 25 cents per click with some of my Adwords content campaigns, I’d be broke. Time to re-think that one.
Next you want to set the time frame or dates your campaign will run. Make sure you choose a campaign end date as people have left comments on other blogs doing MySpace Ads reviews that they’ve accepted the default setting which ends your campaign the day it starts. It might be a good thing if MySpace tweaks that to be out a least a couple of months.
The bottom line is that MySpace has more users than Facebook and could bring many more impressions to your ad. In picking some of the same type demographic as on Facebook Ads, MySpace is showing me millions of potential users vs Facebook’s hundreds of thousands. However, it’s hard to tell how many clicks you’ll get or what the conversions will be like. The 25 cent minimum bid has to go and demographic targeting has to be expanded. MySpace has tons of data on its users and putting out an ad platform without including better targeting is extremely shortsighted. It’s almost as if they though maybe they’d see how much money advertisers are willing to spend before they roll out the whole package. Not good.
One other minor tweak I’d like to see MySpace make is to allow your session time to be a little longer. It must only be about 2 minutes or less because almost every time I refresh the browser, I get kicked back to the login screen.
Anyway, I though I’d at least give it a shot to see if it would produce a little income here. If you want, you can sign up for MySpace Ads here.
