Road Testing Friendster Ads

We were fortunate enough to be able to beta-test the new FAds program (Friendster Ads) andget some free credits to road test the system. Friendster Ads allow you to advertise your products and services to the entire Friendster population on a CPM pricing scheme. (We reported about it here last January.)

These ads are targetted to smaller advertisers witht he lower package at Php15 a pop, equivalent to 150 ad impressions. The highest package is Php1,000 is equivalent to 30,000 impressions spread in a span of 7 days.

I used the free Php1,000 credit (e-Pin) to try out the system for a test run.

The ad creation wizard was simple and very straightforward. Took about 3 steps to complete the ad posting. There’s a preview you can switch to so you’ll see how your ad will display once posted. You are allowed to change the colors of your text ads as well as the background and foreground but that’s basically it. You can take advantage of this feature by choosing a color-scheme that could make your ads more prominent.

You will then be sent 2 emails — one for the tracking code which you can use to track the status and the pageview statistics of your ad posting and another email to notify you if your ad has passed the editorial review.

The tracking page also features a message board where you can leave inquiries to support or maybe even request for a revision of your ad details/texts. All in all, the system works almost perfectly except for a couple of quirks:

1.) Ability to edit/revise your ad content right from the tracking panel (of course, it will need to be re-approved again before republishing.)

2.) Ability to target your viewers by demographics, i.e. age, sex, location, etc., though I’ve read somewhere that this is in the works.

3.) Or how about Pay-per-Click? As of the moment, Fads’ model is pay-per-impression with CPM rate of about $1.

I had some problems using it the first time because I didn’t know how to format the ads like adding links and such. You can’t insert anchor text so you’ll just have to paste the entire URL to be clickable. (I would have liked the entire ad to be clickable though.)

Your click-through rate will highly depend on how good the ad copy and it’s color scheme. The system doesn’t have any click-through reporting so you’ll have to do the traffic monitoring from your website’s end.

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