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.

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.

Earlier this week I made a post about doing a case study on the effects of different CPM bids on Plenty of Fish.  I literally gave away an exact campaign, including ad copy, images, targeting and bids.  I tested different CPM bids of 15c, 25c, 35c and 45c.  I ran this campaign from Sunday – Wednesday.

* This campaign hit it’s $50 daily spending limit everyday it was active.  If this limit would’ve been higher I would’ve received more impressions.

I was pleasantly relieved to see that my assessment of the Plenty of Fish self-serve advertising platform was wrong.  They absolutely do favor the higher bids and will provide more impressions to higher bids.  Ben from Plenty of Fish noticed my last post and if you didn’t happen to read the comments, he provided some valuable insight to their platform.  His quote is below.

Your CPM will have an affect on your CTR because we serve ads based on CPM price. The highest bids get their ads shown to the user first, followed by the next highest and so forth. So if your bid is too low, then the impressions you receive will be from people who have already seen 20 ads (thus the likelihood of clicking and converting are low).

Also, your CPM will have an affect on your traffic flow because the highest bids get their ad quota fillled first, followed by the next highest and so forth. So if your bid is too low, you might not get the priority to start getting a lot of traffic to your site. This explains why CPM is so critical in highly targeted campaigns.

After reading the quote from Ben above and assessing my stats from the 15c and 25c campaigns, I’m wondering if I could use the Session Depth targeting criteria to my advantage. I realize that my stats on those two campaigns aren’t statistically significant, but it got me thinking and made me realize something. When I first login to Facebook, I’ll be checking messages, notifications and status updates first thing and won’t pay attention to the ads at first. Then as I start just dicking around on Facebook, I notice myself paying more attention to the ads.

So this coming week will see me doing a case study that split tests only the session depth.

I’ve noticed on Plenty of Fish that my impression numbers do not change much, regardless of whether I bid the minimum CPM or a much higher CPM.  So, I’ve decided to do a public case study on Plenty of Fish so we can all see if it matters and how much.  The only thing I will be split testing is my CPM bid.  I will bid 15c, 25c, 35c and 45c.

With some affiliates experiencing problems getting blacklisted from offers they promote on Plenty of Fish, I’ve decided to promote a dating offer where the quality isn’t expected to be top notch in the first place.  With this in mind, I’ve picked the Singlesnet offer on Profit Kings Media that accepts traffic from users that are 21 – 24 years of age.

I will only be using one ad copy.  The ad title will be: Single Available Women and the description will be:  There are 986 sexy, single women online in {state:default}. Sign up and meet them today!  The {state:default} will be replaced by the users state they registered in, so it will look more customized for them.

I will be targeting males in the United States that are 21 – 24 and are single, divorced, widowed or separated.

I’ve picked 6 random images from Justin Dupre’s image pack that he released on his blog.  The ones I’ve choosen are below.

[View with PicLens]

I will be automating the creation of these ads using Mr. Green‘s Plenty of Fish Ad Uploader.  I suggest you buy a copy today!

I will report back next week on the numbers.

Just so everybody knows, PPV isn’t the easiest thing in the world to master.  I recently read a thread on WickedFire that made me realize something.  If you bid on anything on TrafficVance your minimum bid is $10 CPM.  This is because the minimum bid is $0.01 x 1000 = $10.

I also tested out a number of campaigns and failed miserably and lost hundreds of dollars.  So if you’re worried about losign a few hundred testing, this is not something you should try.

What I’m giving away here was my first profitable campaign on PPV.  I’m going to let everybody know just how I did it.

First thing I did was sign up on TrafficVance.  When you first sign up you will need at least $1,000 to get started.  So if you’re not able to blow some money, don’t try out PPV.

Next, you will want to go and download Laser URL.  If you don’t know how to use this program go here for Laser URL Tutorial Videos.  You will want to search a very closely related term to your offer using Laser URL.  I always let it search 10 pages deep on all three search engines.  This gives me a number of URL’s to prune and use for testing purposes.  Once you get these URLs, export them to a spreadsheet and then I suggest researching each URL to see if they even relate to your offer.  If they relate, it’ll be one of your targets.

I ran the Mobile IQ Quiz – QuizYou over at EWA.  I used Laser URL to search for the term iq quiz.  I of course pruned my targets and threw the list into TrafficVance.

My first time through I made sure I was the highest bidder on all the URL’s I targetted because I wanted some good test data.  I let it run for a couple days and came back to optimize it.  Make sure you’re tracking where your traffic comes from using the %%$KEYWORD%% variable that TrafficVance uses.  This way you can see which targets are converting and what the EPC for that target is so you can adjust your bids according.

After some time I was able to drop all the low traffic and non-converting targets down to about 10 targets.  The only bad thing about this was that I had to monitor these things day and night because I would get into daily bidding wars on URL’s, especially my best converting URL.  This got tiresome, I finally just got fed up with it and was okay with being in the 3rd spot.  I noticed more and more competition coming in on my targets and I was eventually being out bid on all my target URL’s.  The headache to keep up with these bids eventually became so much that I quit running the offer because of the increased competition and higher bids led to a dismal ROI that was no longer worthy of my time.

I came back a couple months later and noticed all the bids were much lower than they once were so I turned the campaign on and let it run for a couple days.  For whatever reason the offer was no longer converting on these URL’s so I paused the offer and haven’t ran it since.

My gross revenue for this offer was $7,144.00 and my total spend for this campaign was $4,867.27.  That equates to a $2,277 profit and a 46.7% ROI.

P.S. – If you’re going to run a PPV campaign, I suggest that your Prosper202 install be on a dedicated server.  I always suggest LiquidWeb for any server you may need.