If you’re like me, you’ve probably used Google Translate which, in my opinion, is utterly worthless now. I’ve used it a number of times and it provided me a great translation. However it has burned me to the tune of four figures once.  Awhile back, I was running one of the Be2 offers with Neverblue and used Google Translate to translate my ad copy. When I agreed to the terms and conditions of the offer, I didn’t really read them, I just skimmed them like most affiliates would. The advertiser happened to come across one of my ads, traced it back to me and refused to pay me.  They refused payment because the translation of the ad copy was grammatically incorrect and didn’t portray Be2 as they wanted to be portrayed.  Nevertheless, it wasn’t anything demeaning, just horrible grammar.  The terms of the offer are below.  So, I really had no ground to stand on.

Localization – Any translation of English text used in the promotion of Be2 and any Be2 services must be approved in advance by Neverblue. The use of any profanity or sexually suggestive or explicit wording is strictly prohibited. Neverblue reserves the right to immediately remove your account from the applicable campaign and reverse of any commissions you may have earned without giving prior notice to you if you violate any of these additional terms and conditions. All translations must be grammatically correct. If you are uncertain if your creative assets or promotional text and materials are within the brand guidelines, please contact your Neverblue Affiliate Manager. Govern yourself accordingly.

Ever since this day, I knew I had to obtain a better translation service.  I kept hearing Ryan Eagle and other affiliates talk about how good OneHourTranslation.com was, so I decided to give them a shot.  From the beginning, it has always been a pleasure dealing with OneHourTranslation and their layout is really intuitive.   You can either input text to a text box on their site or you can upload a .txt file or MS Word document for translation.  They also are pretty good at returning the translation back to you in the same format you supplied them with.  When you need something translated you can also choose to have it translated by an expert and I typically go this route.  I choose an expert in Marketing/Consumer/Media for translation.  This doubles the price from 7c per word to 14c per word, which I don’t mind paying for.  I’d rather have it done right the first time.  They have cheaper translation services, if you purchase credits in volume and they even accept PayPal.  As their name implies, they usually return your translated text within an hour.  They have a policy that if they can’t provide you with a translation in under 6 hours, it’s free or you get a credit, or something along those lines.  I wouldn’t know the deal exactly, because it hasn’t happened.

If you read the terms above for Be2, you’ll see that you should should clear your ad copy and any other translated text with your affiliate manager.  I reached out to my affiliate manager numerous times to clear ad copy that was done by OneHourTranslation and it always came back as approved.

So if you’re looking for a good translation service, look no further than OneHourTranslation.com!

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Here you will see the ad copy split testing results and conversion breakdown for criteria with more than 5 conversions for the male gender.

As you can see from these results, I will be using the, “Want a Girlfriend?” ad copy, paired with a number of images that did well for me on this campaign. I will also be targeting men who have a bachelor’s degree, average body type, income from $35,001 – $50,000, drink socially and are looking for a long term relationship.  I will build out separate campaigns for each of these 5 criteria.  The rest of the targeting will be exactly like it was in Phase 1, except that I will only be targeting 25-29 year olds and leaving out the 30-32 year olds. They didn’t convert nearly as well as the 25-29 year olds.

And below you will find the ad copy split testing results and conversion breakdown for criteria with more than 5 conversions for the female gender.

Again, we see that the ad copy that performed the best was, “Want a Boyfriend?”. There were no obvious criteria that performed better than the others, so I’m going to leave the female campaign alone and focus solely on the male campaigns since it had more useful data.

I will be building the aforementioned campaigns tonight. Once they blow through the $500 in the coming week, I will make a follow up post with the results.

Please note that I didn’t pause any ad copy on purpose. I only checked the stats once a day and any images with .09 %CTR or lower was paused. So that is probably what contributed to the large discrepancy in the number of clicks each ad copy received.

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Friday

One of the things I always wanted to do was visit Los Angeles, but I have yet to do it.  I was so excited about the trip,  I didn’t get any sleep the night before and I flew out at 5am Friday morning without much hassle.  Once I got there and got my rental car I headed over to the AKMG office in Santa Monica.   Missed an exit or two and ended up East LA.  Oops!  But the trusty iPhone got me where I needed to be.  Once I got there I got to meet the whole AKMG crew and worked out of their offices for a few hours until I could go check into my room over in Marina Del Ray.

Once checked in, I took a desperately needed nap.  The girls with AKMG all had their plans that night and that was fine by me because I had a rental car and I won tickets on Twitter to a Crooked I concert in Pasadena.  I’m a huge fan of Crooked I and he just happened to live in Tulsa for a few years.  I was able to talk to him when he came to Tulsa back in November with his group, Slaughterhouse.  Anyways, after the show was over I got up on stage and was able to chop it up with him for a few years.  This night set the whole weekend off for me.  I knew it was going to be great.  You can see a some footage of the show below.  Too see my cameo, skip to 6:21 in the video.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgdN8VolgwM

Saturday

I finally was able to get around Saturday and start getting prepared for Meetup202 LA.  I had to live it up while I was out there so you know I had to eat at In-N-Out Burger.  That’s my favorite place to eat on the west coast.  So, I knew my presentation was drawing near and I was starting to get nervous.  Finally after eating Eleah Portillo came and picked a brother up and took me to Meetup202 LA.  Thank god there was a little bit of alcohol there to calm my nerves.  Good ol’ Lennisse Ambriz,  Amber Paul and Eva knew I was nervous so they had a great idea for all us to take a shot and Lennisse was a little hesitant until Amber gave her a little whisper.  Well, it came time to take a shot and I requested to trade cups with Lennisse and of course she wouldn’t.  Guess who had water and who had liquor.  I politefully informed them that, “You can’t play a player!“  Silly AKMG girls!

I was the first speaker and I spoke on how to buy banner inventory on websites.  I’m not going to get into much detail here because I’ll dedicate a whole blog post to this.  Even though I was fairly nervous, I settled in rather quickly.  After I was done, I had great feedback from a number of guys, which really made me feel like I had accomplished something. I hope everyone that was there was able to take something away from it.

Next up was Jason Akatiff aka Smaxor, the network owner of Ads4Dough and Nana Gilbert from Tracking202.  They were put up there without much notice for a Q&A session.   There were a number of good questions that both were able to answer and some very specific questions that wouldn’t be answered.  For everybody that was there, take a hint!  There’s probably some gold somewhere around those questions.  You just have to figure out the answer!

After Meetup202 we all went out to some restaurant/bar in Venice.  I think it was Hal’s.  There was probably a good 15 of us or so crammed into a corner.  It was a good time to relax and have a couple drinks after the event.  As far as I know, business was on the back burner and we were all out to have fun.  I, personally, was still tired from the night before and was ready to head home, which I did after we finished eating.  Most everybody else went to another bar in Venice called The Brig, I think.  I chunked the deuce and headed home with Eva and Amber.

Sunday

Today was my day to go have fun and go sightseeing.  To start it off I ate at Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles.  Everybody was hating on my picture on Facebook because the fried chicken was smothered in gravy.  Who doesn’t like gravy on their chicken anyways?  Weirdos.  Once I was done eating Eleah Portillo came and picked me up from the hotel and unfortunately for her, she got to drive me all over Southern California. To start out I had her drive me down Wilmington Avenue which is right in the middle of Compton, California.  We proceeded to hit the 710 Freeway down to Long Beach.  We took Ocean Boulevard, which was beautiful, to the Eastside of Long Beach and drove through the heart of it.  Then I had her take me to Inglewood where we drove down Crenshaw and finally hit Slauson and Crenshaw.  After we were tired of seeing all the ghetto parts we decided to liven up the drive and hit Rodeo Drive and took Wilshire over to the Pacific Coast Highway and headed north to Malibu.  We ate at  Dukes, got a table outside and was able to watch the sunset on the Pacific.  We were even lucky enough to watch some dolphins swim by.  Then it was time to head home and crash!

Monday

Monday I was able to get up and head over to the AKMG office for a few hours before my departure.  In those few hours, I was able to get a lot more work than I thought done.  Maybe I need to get a office here in Tulsa, who knows.  Before I knew it, it was time to head home and was ready for it.

Thanks to Steven, the AKMG Girls, Kim, Amber, Eleah and Lennisse for all letting me come out to beautiful Los Angeles, California.  I had a blast!

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This case study will take a real general dating offer and advertise it to the masses.  I will take the data from their conversion tracking report and break it into ultra-targeted campaigns.  I decided to go with the Singlesnet 25+ offer on C2M.  I’ll be using some pretty generic ad copy that has been proven to work and will give them away below.  The images I’m going to be using were gathered by me personally and I have a feeling that they will do quite well on POF so I won’t be outing those, sorry fellas.  The frequency cap will be set to 3 and my bids will start out at $0.46 using Mr. Green’s 1 Penny Tip.

Targeting Criteria

1. Single, widowed, divorced or separated Males that live in the United States and are between the ages of 25 and 32.
2. Single, widowed, divorced or separated Females that live in the United States and are between the ages of 25 and 32.

Male Ad Copy

1. Single Available Women!
   Are you looking for more single women in {state:your state}? Sign up now and find them tonight!
2. Single Women!
   Are you looking for a single woman in {state:your state}? Sign up now and find her tonight!
3. Want a Girlfriend?
   Sign up now and find a girl in {state:your state} tonight!

Female Ad Copy

1. Single Available Men!
   Are you looking for more single men in {state:your state}? Sign up now and find them tonight!
2. Single Men!
   Are you looking for a single man in {state:your state}? Sign up now and find him tonight!
3. Want a Boyfriend?
   Sign up now and find a man in {state:your state} tonight!

If you advertise on POF and aren’t aware, Mr. Green has released a POF Ad Uploader that is effin awesome!  It will save you tremendous amounts of time uploading ads and split testing campaigns.  It comes with free lifetime updates and is well worth the money.  Here’s a link to my walk through video.

Related posts:

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Edit: Sorry guys, I don’t know why the picture looks like crap on the preview.  Just click the image and it’ll be fine.

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We have an important announcement to make today. I’m not entirely sure how to bring about this news so I am going to do my best and just come out with it. As many of you may know, Tracking202 was acquired by another company in our space known as Bloosky Interactive last November. However since then, many things have changed. A lot of things happened and as some of you may or may not know, I was no longer part of this company for the past few months. This has all changed now.

Today, I’m pleased to announced that the original founders of Tracking202 have undone the acquisition and Tracking202 is no longer a Bloosky Interactive company! As of earlier this week, we completed a deal with Bloosky to get Tracking202 back.  I and a few members of the original Tracking202 team will be heading up the direction of the company moving forward.

We hope to continue innovating in our industry which is in need of great change more than ever. A lot has happened recently both with Tracking202, the affiliate industry and performance marketing space as a whole. We hope to change all of that for the better. We’re bringing back the original Tracking202 culture that many of you have grown to know and fallen in love with.  We are going to do our best to make Tracking202 even better starting by redoing everything that Tracking202 is currently.

We are going to be making some fairly large changes to Tracking202, some of which we’ve already began doing. One of the first things we will be doing is discontinuing Tracking202 Pro soon because we feel there are better opportunities for our company to tackle. We will be posting more and more updates on what’s to come so please feel free to stop by our blog for further future updates.

We know we have a lot of work to do ahead of us and we look forward to making things happen for the community and the industry as a whole with these new changes. We do appreciate all of the support you guys have given us throughout the years and we look forward to working with you guys again.

Hello again,
Wes

I had been hearing rumors about this for the past month or so and wasn’t sure how I felt about the move.  My opinion was that he should re-acquire the company and continue to support it.  I felt it would be in his best interest to start a new product or service for our industry from the ground up to reestablish the support of his target market.

Once it was posted publicly, I originally came forward on WickedFire, with this post, saying that, “The 202 brand will never be what it once was.”  I wanted to come out and say that my post seemed kind of harsh and I didn’t support Wes Mahler in his decision.  I would like to publicly announce that I fully support Wes in whatever he chooses to do.  I just don’t think that the auro that surrounded the 202 Platform before he sold the company to Bloosky will be able to be achieved again.  I’m not saying it can’t be done, I’m just saying he has his work cut out for him if that’s what he wants to do.

I do hope that he continues to build the 202 Platform and expand its services to be everything it has the potential to be.  The consensus is that he tarnished his and 202′s reputation once he sold it.  I never blamed Wes’ decision, ever.  I’m sure his payday was nice and for that reason alone I don’t blame him.  I personally was hoping he would turn himself into a serial entrepreneur and build a new service for this industry or another and all us affiliates could once say we were there when he first hit the big time.

But, those are just my feelings about this move.  I’m excited for Wes and the rest of the 202 team.  They’re all stand up guys and it has always been a pleasure to interact with them from support to partying.

P.S. I’ll be upgrading my 202 install once they release their new version.

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So if anybody still advertises using Google Search or the Content network, use the coupon below.  It says you have go to http://www.google.com/ads/hostgator1 to redeem.

Coupon Code: 3SXR-FQRB-3TVS-2VLR-SQC

Expires June 30th, 2010.

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At first I wasn’t getting enough data in the campaigns with the higher session depth counts, so I was constantly raising my bids in hopes of more traffic.  Even after a full 7 days of running this campaign I didn’t have enough test data and was tired of running the campaign.

After the initial test run it seems my better images have lost their touch and aren’t getting nearly the CTR they used to.  Some of them were less than .10, but for the integrity of the case study I left them running.

The conversion ratios appear to increase as session depth increases but I wouldn’t even come close to saying that the data below is significant after the first thirty impressions.  Probably not even after the first twenty.  And I think the 7.82% increase in conversions between the first and second sets of data may be nullified after sending the same amount of traffic to the second one.  It would probably be best to do another case study for the first twenty impressions, but if you want that data, you’ll have to do the testing yourself.

The only thing I found useful in the case study is that the highest CTR came from the users that had first logged in

Related posts:

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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!

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