Google Ads - Facebook Ads - Reddit Ads Update Thread

@jimbursch thanks! please either direct message me here on the forum or message @feedbands on discord.

The quickstart guide is now live on Dashinformer.com but I'll post it below:

Dash for Merchants - Quickstart Guide
Are you a merchant wanting to integrate Dash payments for your website? Here's a handy quickstart guide for your developer that will allow your customers to pay in nearly any cryptocurrency and settle in Dash.
1. Register a paid account with BlockCypher.com to get an API KEY

2. Download BlockCypher's PHP client library here.

3. Integrate library into project.

4. Create payment forward based on library (see documentation here).

5. Create callback URL for payment forward after user paid (in project).

6. Check transaction after callback from BlockCypher.

7. Save user's payment info & fulfill their purchase. Payment is complete!
 
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Many updates today:

  1. So, it turns out that creating a truly seamless and scalable solution to displaying regional language and content to visitors across the globe was a little more complicated than we originally thought.
  2. After evaluating and working with many different solutions we have finally arrived at the platforms and technologies we need to make this all work in perfect harmony.
  3. We now have translators around the globe translating the content live on site. Translations automatically appear based on the language of the visitors browser, and content properly displays based on the country. All these services have been meticulously debugged and tweaked and configured to play nice with each other.
  4. We can configure subdomains to mirror main domain, but force any language and country specific content. For example, our ru.dashinformer.com mirror displays in the russian language with How To Buy Dash info for Russia.
  5. We can create a mirror for any country/language upon request, but simply visiting dashinformer.com should auto display in any supported language / country.
  6. The benefits of using our mirror approach is that we only need to work with, manage and maintain one site instead of hundreds of sites.
  7. We have an army of translators ready to translate Dash Informer to every language on the planet.
  8. We began running ads on Facebook. Our video ad and merchant site were approved, but we paused to migrate the facebook campaign to an entirely new domain that is completely focused on Dash as a payments provider with no mention of bitcoin or cryptocurrency anywhere on the domain. We are workin *with* facebook and not around them. Still, we want to work with their algorithms as well as their human staff :) Hence the migration.
  9. We created a video teaser for Dash as a payments provider. We did not spend much time on it since we did not know if Facebook would allow it to run. They did, so we are going to improve the video. Video can be seen below.
  10. We have begun running Google Ads targeting people searching for ways to accept bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. We are already making conversions and expanding the Merchant Quickstart guide with full input from folks at Dash Core.
  11. Dash Core is escrowing our scaled up proposal for this month.
  12. All of the Dash Informer intellectual property (domain, site, mailing list, etc) will be wholly owned by the DAO.
Here's the teaser video we threw together that we will improve now that we know Facebook approves it:
 
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Hello feedbands. Great report and good advances.

Following the advices and ideas given by DeepBlue and other MNO's on our proposal (https://www.dashcentral.org/p/Dash-Help-Support-Center - Dash Help Venezuela) we will do the following project, and we think we can work together with you on it:

Idea:
We decided to make a easy guide to send remittances to Venezuela called "Send Money Home". There aprox. 4 millions Venezuelans living overseas, and most of them send remits to their family here, but the process is actually a headache due to goverment regulations, I mean, its difficult to convert dollars/pesos/euro to Bolivares. Dash is a perfect solution for these because it doesn't have geographic borders. So we want to do this guide to all these Venezuelans that want to send remittances. Where can you help us? I know you are working with many translators and collaborators from many different countries (and actually I'm one of the spanish translators), and you have the information about "How to buy Dash" from these countries, you can provide this info to us and we add it on the guide.
What do you think? Let´s work together and make this happen, we will help a LOT of people.

Alejandro
Dash Help Venezuela
 
This is a brilliant idea. Remittances for Latin America is a super powerful use case for Dash and one that could eagerly be adopted. We would love to work together on this.

We can create a Spanish translated "remittance guide" and automatically display it to people in Latin American countries. Perhaps it makes sense to start with Venezuela first and expand out from there.

Let's continue the project planning privately on discord.

Thanks for reaching out Alejandro!
 
Alright guys and gals, merchant related data is starting to flow in.

Targeting Merchants - Driving Merchant Adoption
One of the most significant changes this cycle vs. last cycle is our strategy to specifically target merchants. As we mentioned in the thread above, we created a "Merchant Quickstart Guide" based on our own experience integrating Dash into Feedbands. We also:
  • created a dashinformer.com/merchants page to direct merchants to specifically
  • created a merchant specific retargeting list, so that we can reach in the future all the merchants we are paying to reach
  • created a merchant specific email list to collect email addresses of would-be merchants separately
  • created campaigns, ads, targeting etc. to reach people already searching for how to accept bitcoin, how to accept litecoin, how to accept ethereum. We show them step by step how to accept any crypto and settle in Dash.
Our goal through all of this is to fully segment the merchants out so that we can reach them via email, advertising and messaging completely separately from the rest of our general audience and userbase.

What are are finding is that on average, a merchant-related goal costs us about $30 to $40. Consumer and crypto-enthusiast related goals cost us on average $15 last cycle, but we have since got that to somewhere between between $5 and $8. This is primarily due to the fact that there is actually bid competition on search terms for "accepting bitcoin" since many for profit companies are in that space. Nevertheless, it is essential that Dash have presence on these searches.

We are now experimenting with volumes and refining our strategy to approach merchants. The thought is, every day tens of thousands of people are searching Google to find out how to accept Bitcoin. Let's capture a significant percentage of them and convince them to accept everything and and settle in dash.

We'll provide a full goal breakdown at the end of this campaign but we are already seeing a very significant percentage of merchant related goals this cycle. Merchant related goals are any further actions taken that are related to the merchant process, like viewing integration documentation and visiting websites and github repositories to perform payment integration.

The question now is testing volumes. We know we can get about 50 merchant related goals around the world each day for $30-$40 per goal, but if we upped it to $100 per goal perhaps we could capture hundreds per day. We'll proceed cautiously and report back, as always.

Also, we have been getting some great feedback from Dash Core that we'll be incorporating into our content and ads as well.

We have executed an escrow agreement for funding for the next three cycles, which also places ownership of the Dash Informer web property firmly in the hands of the DAO.
 
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Hello friend. Getting merchant is absolutely the right thing to do, you are such a hardworking user and i think the community should thanks all the effort you are doing.

I want a simple question: what do you mean with "capture" merchant? What does this mean in detail?
 
Ah, so "capturing" merchants simply means to bring them into our sales funnel. It looks something like this:

1. Merchant who knows nothing about Dash but wants to accept bitcoin searched google for "How To Accept Bitcoin"
2. Merchant sees an ad that leads to Dash Informer, telling them how to accept Bitcoin and settle in Dash
3. Merchant clicks the ad, comes to our page, and follows our quickstart guide. The merchant is now accepting Bitcoin and other cryptos, and settling in Dash and has also been brought into the Dash Ecosystem. This merchant has been "captured" : )
 
Ads are now paused. We have exhausted the $44,000 budget this cycle. Full report coming shortly but here is a results snapshot in the meantime:

  • We drove 370,000 targeted users to the site
  • 7300 goals were completed
  • 440 Merchant-related goals were completed
  • Average cost per goal was just $6 (down from $15 last cycle)
  • Average merchant related goal cost approximately $35
  • We added 725 emails to our consumer email list
  • Our consumer remarketing list ballooned to 208,000
  • Our merchant remarketing list grew to 10,000
  • Our site maintained 100% uptime which you can check anytime from our monitor
  • During the course of our campaign, the price of Dash moved from $395 on the day we started to $650 today when we paused the ads. We will never claim that price movement is directly correlated to our campaign. Still, we will always report how Dash performed during the course of our campaign.
Look for the full report out soon. Moving forward we want to shift about 75% of the budget towards merchant adoption.
 
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So as some of you know, we contract manufactured some chocolate dash coins.

Our chief designer created an ad using the actual coins as backdrop. Here's what we came up with:

original-1.jpg


original.jpg
 
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what are some important lessons you learned from doing these ads and do you have any recommendations for other people trying to do this too?
 
Hey Luke, great question. Our team has learned a lot. Is there a particular area you're interested in?

Also, thank you Dash Network for your vote of confidence to scale this campaign up.

Since our proposal was escrowed by Dash Core with a Core wallet address, the process works a little differently now. We invoice them and they have 14 days to send the funds.

By the time we receive the funds, we should have a beautiful revamped landing page complete as well as a beautiful dashboard for the network to monitor all campaign statistics in real time, including goals, ad spend, etc.

There is a question of making the campaign dashboard public to everyone or MNO only. Your thoughts on this are appreciated.
 
Quick update everyone, escrow funds have been received and we are gearing up to get this going in just a few days!

We have been working diligently since the end of last cycle on a beautiful new landing page, the design was completed about two weeks ago, and our developers are just about ready to launch it this coming week, we think on wednesday.

Here is the plan moving forward:
  • Once the new landing page is live, we will test it and make sure it is all working properly before turning the ads back on.
  • Initially, we'll be disabling all non english languages, and immediately begin retranslating the bits of text that have changed from our testing server
  • We'll be incorporating a support portal for dash help venezuela, as well as information on their remittances
  • We'll be launching spanish language ads across venezuela and latin american countries
  • We'll be incorporating Get Free Dash information in the spanish language and targeting it to Venezuela with dedicated ad campaigns
And the biggest most exciting part yet, you'll be able to monitor all our progress, track every dollar spent and every goal completion in real time.

We have been working on a beautiful dashboard that tracks all our ad campaigns and goals across all platforms, visualized in one place, for the Network to keep tabs. There is a question as to whether or not this should be MNO-only, or public, and we'd love some input here.
 
Hello feedbands

Could you, please, share guest access to your advertising account to several members of Dash core to monitor actual ad spend as you mentioned before in one of the comments on dash central?

Dashboard is great and beautiful, but numbers there can be easily faked. And there is no need to share it with everyone in the community. Guest access to several Dash core members would be more than enough.

What do you think?
Thank you in advance!
 
DashToFreedom said:
Hello feedbands

Could you, please, share guest access to your advertising account to several members of Dash core to monitor actual ad spend as you mentioned before in one of the comments on dash central?

Dashboard is great and beautiful, but numbers there can be easily faked. And there is no need to share it with everyone in the community. Guest access to several Dash core members would be more than enough.

What do you think?
Thank you in advance!
Click to expand...

Yes, of course. It is a requirement of our escrow agreement to prove our spend and sharing access is the easiest way. Will confirm once it's all set up.

That said, we still want to share the dashboard which Core can confirm its accuracy. We are not sure if it would be better to make it public or MNO only, or maybe whitelist access to any MNO or well known community member
 
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Quick update regarding the ad bans from Google / Facebook / Twitter. We are going to continue to pursue merchant facing repositioning through the legacy channels, but aside from that we are now shifting gears to focus on forming direct advertising relationships with top referring sites, effectively cutting Google out as middle man. We'll have more updates soon but we should have no problem delivering all the volume necessary through direct relationships. The targeting won't be quite as precise but the sites will be highly relevant.
 
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