ABS-CBN's Digital Advertising Self-serve Hub (DASH) review

If you are a business owner, blogger, vlogger, marketer, or even a promoter looking for a space to advertise or do promotions, doing it online is one of the best ways to do it. There are a lot of sites to choose from especially from the social media industry! But if you are targeting a specific niche like audiences who love entertainment from the Philippines, they might just help you big time.

ABSCBN DASH

ABS-CBN launched DASH which is a self-serve hub for digital advertising or directly named Digital Advertising Self-serve Hub). It is like a Filipino version of Google Ads where they display ads on their various online platforms.

I tried it and I have some good news and some not-so-good news upon trying it. But let's start the process from the very beginning.

1. REGISTER

Simple register and create an account HERE. (button found on the upper right of your screen) 

2. CREATE AN AD CAMPAIGN

- Name the ad campaign

- Select what type of ad will you run between an image or a video

create an ad

3. SELECT FROM THEIR WEBSITES (where you want the ad to be displayed)

Currently, you can select from the following 

* ANCX

* ABS-CBN Entertainment

* ABS-CBN News

* iWantTFC
* Metro.Style
* OneMusic

* PUSH

* Star Cinema

ABS-CBN sites

ABS-CBN sites

4. SELECT A PRODUCT (indicated ad sizes varies)

Read and select what you prefer

product ad

5. TARGETING DEMOGRAPHICS

Target who your target audience are via their location setter and even the specific time your ad gets promoted (as per will)

demographics targeting

6. ALLOCATING BUDGET and AD SPAN

Input your desired budget (min. of P500 per ad) and the specific time frame of the whole promotion.

budget allocation

7. CREATIVES and URL DESTINATION

Upload the specific creative you want to use. In selecting your product (on no. 4 above), make sure to adhere to the correct size for your creative and select the landing page when clicked.

creatives

8. AVAILABILITY

 

Simply check the availability of their inventory for your order by clicking the provided button. It will let you know if you can continue to the next step or needs some editing from the things you provided above.

availability checking

And there you have it! You'll have an up and running advertisement in partnership with ABS-CBN sites after paying it via a credit card and passing the assessment from their team.

P.S. Assessment or approval of ads can take day(s) so make sure to allot ample time for this.

MY EXPERIENCE

It was easy to register and all as most of the stuff here was do-it-yourself (DIY), well, it's a self-serve hub in the first place.. but creating your own creatives would be one of the challenges here. The major issue encountered though was that they were saying that my landing page has issues according to Google. It led them to recommend to me to change my landing page which was a non-negotiable thing for me. My site adheres to Google policies where I also show Google Ads here so I am kind of confused as to what the problem on their end had.

I tried to change the URL using the same site but the prompt from their end still persists. The email exchanges took some time where my ad campaign already ended so I was forced to ask for a refund as per my initial payment.

My ad campaign as per their report recorded some impressions despite the issues so I still got billed with the amount given below.

DASH analytics

I actually tried to visit the ABS-CBN sites many times (when it was active) with the hope of actually seeing my creative there but did not succeed in seeing one. But as a consolation thing for me, I saw a traffic source coming directly from the ABS-CBN site. This one though probably is a special case upon testing and trying to resolve the prompting issue.

ABS-CBN as traffic source

To be fair, I was actually getting some visits from the traffic source "Google Ad services" which I assume came from this project. I was not doing any paid campaign at that time except this so I find it off to see the click-through rate (CTR) from their end zero.. unless these visits came from the backend of the ad service which will totally answer the question.

Moving on, I am still open to trying it again where my ad will be hosted by their other sites (other than the abs-cbn site) with the exception of the issue being resolved first. Their support replies accordingly so I guess it is still workable for another try. I will update this blog when it happens.