$150 Later Using MyLikes.com Social Ad Platform. | Hacker News Reader

$150 Later Using MyLikes.com Social Ad Platform.

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20 pointsjasonwilk20 comments

WhiteyBoard is a physical product. Get it on the shelves of Walmart, then use social media to build brand awareness. Otherwise, stick to intent based advertising like search ads.

This is particularly true for non-geographically targeted traffic. I'm the ideal customer for this product, but given that I live in Canada, any cent spent to reach me is wasted. I won't pay $40 in shipping for an $18 product or even a $35 one.

This is Arvind - one of the co-founders of MyLikes. We do offer location targeting (all the way upto a metro level). In this case, his campaign was paying only for US clicks - (our system guides and publishers self-select since they are only paid for clicks from the location that the advertiser is interested in).

That's a great feature, Arvind. I'll keep MyLikes in mind.

No offense, but if you're reaching out to that many people and getting zero engagement it's probably just not an interesting campaign. Young people (twitter user demographics) are awesome at filtering out ads, they don't process things unless they're unique/funny/interesting. I'm not a marketer (in fact, I'm pretty terrible at such things; so take my critical view with a grain of salt), but the reason people remember old spice isn't for the deodorant.

Perhaps try a new direction with your messaging, before you give up on the medium/channel. I'd love to see more A/B testing here to know what really works.

We tried creating an Old Spice type commercial. http://www.youtube.com/user/whiteyboard#p/a/u/0/JUi2bLcryfc

With 12,000 views it looks like a far more engaging campaign... and probably cheaper. Curiously, what were your landing page/sales rates from this?

It's really hard to say how the video has performed for us. It's a main feature of the website therefore hard to put a metric on it.

In terms of virality, it was a failure in our books.

Personally, I wouldn't buy your product based on your ad because it looks like your product is a flimsy plastic sheet someone can make by unwrapping a plastic bag.

I remember reading about this on Reddit, how were sales there? Also, have you considered targetting your product to people like college students, or designers, etc?

It's not like a flimsy plastic sheet. I know the kind of product you're talking about, WhiteyBoard is not that. We just did a bad job of showing the product off in the video (correction; our director and set designers did a poor job)

We've thought about advertising to college students. We did a couple of free promotions at UCLA where we handed out our sticky notes for free, but those are tough sales to track. Students are also a tough demo to reach with marketing. Probably one of the main reasons 99% of our sales still just come from word of mouth. We have a good product and it's cheap.

I am the CEO of MyLikes. Just wanted to chime in and say that the system typically takes 24 - 48 hrs to match your campaign to relevant publishers / disapprove irrelevant ones etc. Please check your campaign again. Only $50 of your campaign is currently spent. My sense is you will also get a lot more tweets from relevant publishers in the next 24 hrs.

If you're paying that much for non-targeted advertising, you might as well just get junk traffic (it's cheaper).

If you're comparing $0 revenue, then yes, junk traffic would work the same. We've proved with other avenues, however, that non-targeted advertising works for our brand in some cases.

Jason, how are you measuring conversions on your end? I didn't see any tracking codes in your campaign urls. We do have a advertisers who measure conversions as well as a lot of them who are just interested in building brand awareness.

You're paying for people to astro-turf your app to people that are interested in what that person has to say, not necessarily looking for whatever your site does.

what ad service did you use for the reality star ?

for those talking about the campaign or the non targeting, I think the example he mentions about using another service is relevant.

I'm not familiar with MyLikes, but are the influencers that are used for advertising, are they able to be chosen by the companies, like ad.ly ? How transparent is the process of what influencers are running the ads ?

The reality star was just a friend of my co-founder.

I'd be more interested in who are the people MyLikes chose to advertise your campaign based on the categories you chose. From the categories you chose.. Moms, Youth/teens, Finance,Education, Art, Small business. This seems like its the right target for your product.

Right, we certainly picked the correct target demos based on all the research we have on who has purchased products in the past. MyLike lets people categorize themselves, which is a problem.

Our influencers choose from a huge variety of ads that they are interested in. They also write the message that they want to send out. Since we payout based on relevant clicks (and rank influencers based on their click through rate), we incent influencers to make sure that they post things that their audience is interested in.

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