myTarget - hiding behind servers
Hi, Megamind!
The time has come for instructive stories! We want to share our experience with myTarget, tell us what happened and warn the others. We hope that our case will help someone save time, money and nerves.
Disclaimer. In general, we would call myTarget experience positive. But if everything went well, this article would hardly have appeared.
Timeline of events:
On July 7th, we launched test advertising campaigns, hoping that we can track ads with low click-through rates in real time. If the campaign has already been run-in, we can predict user reactions and approximate performance, as we have already eliminated bad ads and optimized delivery scenarios. For new campaigns, almost every minute tracking is essential.
For 2 hours, the statistics service said that not a single ad was shown even once. We wrote to the support team asking about the possible reasons for this strange behavior of the service.
After 3 hours, support finally responded.
Without waiting for the day to pass, we turned off all advertising campaigns. It remains only to wait for the appearance of statistics to see how the ads worked and how much money is left on the account. Someone joked that the entire budget has already been unscrewed.
The next day (!) The statistics became available. As predicted, the budget went to zero, and remarketing ads were not even shown. With a squeak of heart, we wrote in support again.
The support service in the person of Alexei was cold - we got three lines from which it became clear that nothing terrible had happened. Alex did not even try to hide behind the servers.
After that, myTarget technical support was completely silent.
And how did it end?As you may have guessed, we lost client money forever, but we cannot refuse to use the system. I had to replenish the account and resume advertising campaigns. Statistics (so as not to jinx it) so far is working fine, without daily delays. But this story has an open ending. After all, no one can know on which of his accounts the servers suddenly cease to cope with the load.
The most valuable thing in digital advertising is that it can be moderated in real time based on the observed results. If this is not possible, what is the difference between digital and flyers at the metro?