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.
