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Case Study: Using POF Conversion Tracking to make... I spent $550 and tried to split the amount between the male and female campaigns for Singlesnet.  I've included a copy of ad copy split testing results and the conversion...

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Case Study: Using POF Conversion Tracking to make... I spent $550 and tried to split the amount between the male and female campaigns for Singlesnet.  I've included a copy of ad copy split testing results and the conversion...

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Case Study: Using POF Conversion Tracking to make a... Plenty of Fish has recently implemented conversion tracking into their ad platform.  This will show you the exact characteristics of your converting users.  You can use...

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Hide the Referral Analytics on your tracking domain! 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...

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$250 Worth of Media Buy Advice Here recently I finally took part in my first media buy and I ended up losing my $250 because of the mistakes I made.  I was all dreamy-eyed because it was my first media...

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Case Study: Using POF Conversion Tracking to make a Profitable Campaign – Phase 2

Posted by Riley Pool | Posted in Affiliate Marketing, CPM, Case Study, Plenty of Fish | Posted on 23-07-2010

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I spent $550 and tried to split the amount between the male and female campaigns for Singlesnet.  I’ve included a copy of ad copy split testing results and the conversion breakdowns for both, males and females. For the campaign targeting males I spent a total of $300.89 for 26 conversions at $4.00, resulting in a loss of $196.89. When it came to females I spent $254.43 for 21 conversions at $4.00, which also resulted in a loss to the tune of $170.43. These kinds of losses can be expected when you do really broad targeting to a really broad dating offer. My goal here was to try and find certain target criteria that converted better than others and I did just that, which I’ll talk about shortly.

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

Ad Copy Clicks Conversion Rate
Single Available Women 173 2.89%
Single Women 140 2.86%
Want a Girlfriend? 271 6.27%
Factor Conversions Conversion Rate
Education – Bachelors Degree 7 7.61%
Body Type – Average 11 5.56%
Income – 35,001 to 50,000 7 5.22%
Age 18-30 20 4.66%
Drinking – Socially 19 4.58%
Relationship – Long Term 6 4.35%
Body Type – Athletic 10 4.31%
Country – USA 21 4.19%
Education – High School 6 4.11%
Car – Yes 17 3.95%
Relationship – Dating 10 3.94%
Smoke – No 15 3.79%
Marital Status – Single 17 3.68%
Intent – Putting in serious effort to find someone 8 3.43%

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.

Ad Copy Clicks Conversion Rate
Single Available Men 174 2.30%
Single Men 64 4.69%
Want a Boyfriend? 266 5.26%
Factor Conversions Conversion Rate
Relationship – Dating 6 4.41%
Marital Status – Single 14 4.32%
Smoke – No 12 4.17%
Car – Yes 12 4.03%
Country – USA 14 3.83%
Female – Age 18-30 13 3.82%
Body Type – Average 6 3.53%
Drinking – Socially 9 3.05%

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.

Case Study: Using POF Conversion Tracking to make a Profitable Campaign – Phase 1

Posted by Riley Pool | Posted in Affiliate Marketing, CPM, Case Study, Plenty of Fish, Tracking | Posted on 10-07-2010

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Plenty of Fish has recently implemented conversion tracking into their ad platform.  This will show you the exact characteristics of your converting users.  You can use these reports to take a non-profitable campaign and turn it into something that will help you regain the money you lost testing and ultimately turn a profit.

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.

Plenty of Fish Case Study – Session Depth – Results

Posted by Riley Pool | Posted in Affiliate Marketing, CPM, Case Study, Plenty of Fish | Posted on 04-06-2010

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As promised in Plenty of Fish Case Study: Session Depth and Plenty of Fish Case Study: Session Depth (repost) I would do a case study where I would test the conversion ratio against the POF user’s Session Depth.  After letting this campaign run for a week I was very disappointed with the results of this case study and I’m sure you will be too.

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

Session Depth Spent CTR CVR Revenue Profit/Loss
1 – 10 $  359.10 0.111% 5.486% $     252.55 $ (106.55)
11 – 20 $  130.18 0.107% 5.915% $       86.75 $   (43.43)
21 – 30 $    83.41 0.111% 5.479% $       49.70 $   (33.71)
31 – 40 $    53.05 0.090% 7.143% $       32.90 $   (20.15)
41 – 50 $    42.77 0.072% 4.412% $       12.45 $   (30.32)
51 – 60 $    32.06 0.078% 7.273% $       16.50 $   (15.56)
60 + $    32.27 0.081% 8.475% $       20.65 $   (11.62)

Plenty of Fish Case Study: Session Depth (repost)

Posted by Riley Pool | Posted in Affiliate Marketing, CPM, Case Study, Plenty of Fish | Posted on 23-05-2010

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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.

Plenty of Fish Case Study: Session Depth

Posted by Riley Pool | Posted in Affiliate Marketing, CPM, Case Study, Plenty of Fish | Posted on 16-04-2010

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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 the offer I was promoting just happened to go down the night before I was going to submit the ads.  I complained and got a very similar offer,  PKM‘s Singlesnet 22+ offer that accepts male traffic.  I will be targeting single, widowed, divorced or separated males in the United States who are 22 – 24.  I will setup separate campaigns to 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+

Since I don’t want to lose money on this case study, I’m not going to out the images I use.  I’m going to use the ones that perform best for me.  However, my ad copy and targeting will all be uniform, except for the session depth criteria.

I finally got this campaign live and I plan on letting it run until I get back from ad:tech on Wednesday.  I’ll let you guys know the results at that time.