Here recently a buddy of mine hit me up on AIM and say hey man, I see that you’re running X offer on Y traffic source.  I asked him how he knew and he said he simply looked at the referral analytics on my tracking domain.  Even though the data was’t current, it was dead on about what I was running at one time and made it made me a pretty penny.  I’m glad that he and I are good friends and gave me the 411 so I could remedy the situation.

So if you go over to Quantcast.com, Compete.com or Alexa.com and throw in a tracking domain you can easily see where some of its traffic may be coming from.  There are a couple ways you can hide your information, but the way I prefer to do it is below.  I’m a newb and don’t use any other tools similar to this.  So if there are other tools, you may want to also hide your data on those sites too.  You should also post a comment listing similar sites so I can do the same.

One way is to sign up to Quantcast.com and choose which parameters are available for viewing to others.  On Compete.com your best bet is to email their support team and let them know you don’t want your domain’s data to be public information.  They might fight with you about this.  If they do, politely inform them that this is an ad serving and tracking domain and that you would very much appreciate it if they could unpublish the results for your domain when they release their data for the coming month.  Finally you have Alexa.com.  All you have to do is look at the Clickstream for that particular domain and all I’m gonna say is good luck getting them to remove your information.  I have yet to make this happen and they seem hell bent on not removing any data.  I’m to the point to where I will be talking to my attorney shortly to see if there’s anything I can possibly do.

Does anybody know any other domains that track referrers and display the information to the public?  Care to post it in the comments?

Better yet, do you know a way to get Alexa to hide your Clickstream?  Let a brother know!

This is a repost of my original Plenty of Fish Case Study: Session Depth post. There are a handful of reasons why I never posted a results post.  After two weeks, I was never able to get enough traffic to make my results statistically significant and my conversions were just all over the place, so there were no developing trends.  So I emailed Ben over at POF and let him know that I had a feeling that they might not have been serving my impressions based on my targeting criteria.  He confirmed that the way I setup my targeting criteria, I wasn’t being delivered the inventory I was wanting.  Then I went on vacation during the first week of May and I came back and had a number of things to take care of.  Unfortunately, this was towards the bottom of my list, but I’ve finally gotten to it.

I’ve rehashed the previous post with the updated offer and campaign details.

In my previous Plenty of Fish Case Study, I tested CPM bid vs. Number of Impressions and received results that shattered my original assumption and the results turned out as they should have. The higher the bid, the more impressions you would received.  However, my conversions started trending down as my bid was raised.  And since Ben from POF told me that the higher the bid, the quicker the ad would be shown to the user, I came to the conclusion that session depth may be a big factor in my conversion ratio.  So, I’ve decided to do a case study on the session depth targeting criteria.

Since Markus outlawed my previous ad copy, I’m going to have to use a whole new ad copy.  And I decided to switch up the offer.  After asking Yousif what his best performing POF offer is, he told me to run Match – Canada since it accepts 18+ traffic.  I will be targeting single, widowed, divorced or separated males in the United States who are 18 – 24.  I will setup separate campaigns to split test the session depth targeting criteria as I’ve outlined below.  I will bid 35c and my daily limit will be $50 per day per campaign.  The distribution is evenly and the frequency cap is set to 5.

Headline: Want a Girlfriend?

Description: There are single women online in {state: Your State}. Sign up now!

Variable: Session Depth

1. Session Depth 1 – 10
2. Session Depth 11 – 20
3. Session Depth 21 – 30
4. Session Depth 31 – 40
5. Session Depth 41 – 50
6. Session Depth 51 – 60
7. Session Depth 61+

Image-wise, I’m not going to out the images I’m using this time.  I found a new resource of images and picked out a handful of good ones.  Hopefully they perform well for me.

I submitted this campaign just a few minutes ago and I plan on letting it run until I obtain statistically significant results.  I’ll let you guys know the results at that time.

Only temporarily…  In reality, I took a much-needed vacation.  It was a 5-day cruise down to Progreso and Cozumel, Mexico.  All I’m gonna say is cruises are not made for 20-something singles.  They’re designed for couples and older folk. I don’t wanna go into every single detail, but I made the cruise fun by drinking, A LOT!  I’ll include an overview of the days, but that’s all you guys get. If you have specific questions post a comment and I’ll answer.

I drove from Tulsa, OK to Galveston, TX on Friday night to get there Saturday at noon for.  It was about a 10 hour drive and wasn’t as bad as I thought.  I was so tired from driving all night that I ended up sleeping the entire first evening of the cruise and missed the best event, the only event for singles the entire trip. FML!  Oh well…

The first full day was a Fun Day at Sea.  They had activities during the day for you to participate in, but they were geared towards older folk.  They included events such as an Art Auction and Comedy Routines.  Once we got up and around we took the Vodak we smuggled on the ship and drank 3/4 of the bottle and decided to spend the day find out what the ship had to offer while drinking as many beers and Strawberry Daquiris I could.

The following day we had our first stop, in Progreso, Mexico.  I signed up for a shore excursion called the Corona Beach Party that lasted 4 hours.  They took us to a small beach and we had an open bar with all the Coronas, Margaritas and Pina Coladas we could handle.  We had all the usual beach activities such as volleyball, singing, tug-o-war, waverunners for rent, etc… The best part of this excursion was the fact we walked into town and talked with the locals.  They tried to sell us everything, including pipes, weed, cocaine and pills.  It was probably my favorite part about the cruise.

The next day was a stop in Cozumel, Mexico.  I signed up for a Sail, Snorkel and Beach Party shore excursion.  A boat took us down the coastline about 20 minutes where we could snorkel for about 20 minutes.  The waters were as clear as everything advertises they are.  It was amazing.  We could easily see the bottom which was probably around 40 feet.  Then they took us to a secluded beach and there were toys in the water such as trampolines, a wall to climb on and other things.  We had enough time to rent waverunners this time and they were a blast.  It was the first time I’ve ever ridden one and now I want to buy one.  They finally took us back so we could board ship and we at at Three Amigos before boarding.  Since me and the guy I went with forgot our watches we didn’t know how much time we did or didn’t have to mess around, so we boarded the ship and we were about 2 hours early.  We were already drunk and decided to take a nap before dinner.

The next day was another Fun Day at Sea which I made fun by probably being the drunkest person on the ship.  I spent the day playing roulette and running up a $250 bar tab that day.  The nightcap was dancing my ass off at the Stripes club on the ship.

We docked on Thursday and spent the weekend relaxing in Galveston and came back home Sunday.  One of my most favorite places to eat is Pappadeux.  If you’re ever in or around Houston or Dallas, stop in and eat there.  You will not be disappointed!

The pictures from my cruise are below.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

1234...8910►

P.S. I’ve got some good posts coming, so stay tuned!

Awhile back I blogged about attending an Oklahoma Meetup.  It was a great event that was sponsored by Revenue Ads, NDemand and NDustry Clix.

While we were hanging out at Revenue Ads‘ Office, I was telling my affiliate manager that I was doing well on a very specific offer and which traffic source I was promoting it on.  The offer was, as I said, very specific and you couldn’t mistake where I was running the offer at.  Not to mention I specified where I was running it at.  Unfortunately, the offer I was referring to died a few days before the meetup so I felt comfortable letting people know what I had already done well with.  I’m always more than willing to give some affiliates a few tips.

Well I came home and was thinking about how I could get that revenue stream back open and it dawned on me… There was a generic offer that was almost the exact same, so I switched out my links to the new offer and resumed my ads.  The 2nd day I ran this campaign I had my first 5-figure day.  The only thing limiting me on this offer was I hit my damn spend limit at the bank which was a huge fail on my part.

So for anybody that was at the meetup and remember me talking about this, try it out!  This offer is still live and I’m still running it!

P.S. I’m glad most people never take action on other people’s advice.