Labels

Categories: Food | Travel | Beer | Wine | Boston | Humor | TV | Tech | Pop Culture | Politics | Golf | Video | Photo | Auto
Sponsored: Samsung | Cadillac | Volt | GMC | AT&T | Gear List: Cameras, Lights, Microphones, etc.
More: SteveGarfield.com | Steve Garfield's Video Blog (archived 6/19/2013)
“As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.” | Mastodon

Thursday, December 01, 2011

If Your Website is Down, Don't Run Ads on Spotify

Bonobos.com is down. by stevegarfield
Bonobos.com is down., a photo by stevegarfield on Flickr.

I heard a great ad for Bonobos.com on Spotify, so I clicked the link and headed over there.

Bonobos.com was down. They had a great 404 page though, and asked me for my email.

I entered my email so I could get notification when the site was back up.

Later on I heard another ad for Bonobos.

I went to the site and it was still down.

I searched twitter and saw that the site had been down for days.

So I sent out a tweet to Bonobos:

"@Bonobos Tell @Spotify to stop running ads, unless you want to keep acquiring email addresses."

It's hard to get the point across in 140 characters, but what I meant was that the 404 page asking for email addresses is actually a good marketing technique to acquire emails, but not so good when the site is down.

They replied:

"Bonobos: @stevegarfield Is it just our ads you don't like, or the ads in general? Any recommendations of ads you do like?"

I needed to write this explanation here for them so it'll be clear.

If your site is down, you probably shouldn't keep running ads that drive traffic to a 404 page.