Plenty of Fish recently introduced a new targeting criterion on May 6th, 2011 that allows to target which users that have clicked a certain number of ads. You now have three options available. Hopefully in the near future they’ll split up the middle option into groups of 5.

• Ads Clicked 0-4
• Ads Clicked 5-19
• Ads Clicked 20+

As soon as they announced this I immediately wanted to test this.  The campaign details are below. Only thing that changed between campaigns was Ads Clicked. I used the same offer and same creatives for all these tests. The test was run Tuesday, May 10th – Monday, May 16th.

• Country = United States
• Age Between 18, 24
• Gender = Male
• Marital Status = Separated, Widowed, Divorced, Single
• Browser Type ≠ Android/iPhone
• Ads Clicked = 0-4 or 5-19 or 20+
• Frequency Cap: 3
• Bid: 50c

First off, I must apologize to everybody for my post a couple months ago about dayparting on Facebook. I saw the new campaign lifetime feature on Facebook and mistook it for day parting. I hurriedly made a post and then realized my mistake. So, if you came to my blog hoping for dayparting, I’m sorry for leading everybody on. I just got super excited and wanted to be the first to blog about it.

I also must tell you I was quite pissed because I had done a lot of testing for this particular case study to see how CPC compared to CPM and right in the middle of my testing Facebook started displaying a fourth advertisement, so I had to throw that data away.

When I originally started advertising on Facebook all I did was bid CPC as there was less risk and bid prices were cheap. I stuck with that method for months and never tried CPM. Shortly after ASE 2009 I moved over to only CPM bidding and never looked back. Earlier this year I moved onto other traffic sources and quit paying attention to Facebook. Here recently I’ve gotten back into advertising on Facebook. I noticed the suggested bid prices for CPC and CPM were both outrageous. I did remember a big hoopla from Facebook earlier this year during my exodus about how you should bid CPC for better positions and all that. The last 4-6 weeks I’ve been noticing some people suggesting bidding CPC for best results. I never really saw any definitive information or statistics backing either side so I decided to turn this into a case study.

There are two main bidding types when advertising.  They are known as CPC or cost per click and CPM or cost per thousand impressions.  There are advantages and disadvantages to each type.  Below is a synopsis of both bidding types.  Choose what you feel is appropriate for your particular campaign or do a split test to see what does best for your needs.

Cost Per Click – CPC

When you choose the CPC bid type, you’ll be charged every time someone clicks on your ad.  This option is less risky, especially if you’re entering a new niche and aren’t sure how well your ads and especially images will perform.  I’ve found if you can get a high enough CTR, preferably below your EPC, you can bid this type and should be able to see some longevity with your campaign.

Cost Per Impressions – CPM

When you choose the CPM bid type, you’ll be charged for every one thousand impressions your ad receives.  This is an especially good option if you’re a branding advertiser. If you’ve been advertising in your niche and know what kind of ad copy and images work well, this may be your preferred bid type.  A general rule of thumb is if you can get a CTR above 0.10%, choose this bid type because your CPC will be cheaper this way.  You’ll want the highest possible CTR when bidding CPM.  The higher your CTR, the cheaper your CPC will be.  However, when bidding CPM, you will need to constantly monitor your ads to make sure your CPC is still below your EPC.

The stats for each campaign is below.  I’m not going to reveal the actual campaigns and exact targeting because these are two of my super stable campaigns that have done very well for me in the past and continue to do so.  However, I will tell you that that Campaigns 1-4 are a niche US dating offer and Campaign 5 is a broad dating offer in Canada. I ran the same set of ads in each campaign and I bid the highest CPC and CPM suggested by Facebook.

Conclusion
As you can see from the results, CPC was the way to go in each test except for one.  I’ve done countless other CPC versus CPM tests and 95% of the time CPC comes out on top.  I know the bids are extremely high, but just try it out.  With CPC, you’ll notice your CTR is way higher and conversions are typically better.  Bidding CPC will also be beneficial to you because your target demographic will be less prone to banner blindness. CPC bidding will add longevity to your campaigns, while you will need to continually monitor your CPM campaigns.  I’m not sure why conversions are better. I didn’t check my Prosper202 logs to see if most of my CPC traffic came from Facebook or if it was application traffic. Because of these results, I do believe that CPC ads are placed in the top 1 or 2 spots and that CPM traffic goes mostly to the bottom spots. There is a CTR apex where it will be more beneficial to run CPM instead of CPC, but I haven’t yet figured that out because you’ll need to also factor in CPC and EPC for each ad.

Sorry it took me quite some time to post this follow up post, but it was quite a bit tougher to get traffic.  After hearing a couple people tell me they were seeing the same exact ad copy on POF, I’m assuming that a number of affiliates copied my campaign and tried to make some money, and I hope many of you were able to!  I always like helping out new affiliates looking for their first breakthrough campaign.

This campaign was an exact copy from the POF: Weeding out non-converters using Conversion Tracking post, including images, except for the targeting criteria I excluded as described in POF: Weeding out non-converters using Conversion Tracking – Phase 2. I ran this campaign from October 28th – November 8th and was only able to spend about $20-$25/day although my budget was set to $50/day.  I also assume this was from increased competition, but it may have very well been that there was less traffic available due to the targeting criteria I excluded, or a combination of both.  There’s really no way to tell, unless I was to change the targeting mid-campaign and I didn’t want to jeopardize the integrity of the results of this case study.

In comparing my results from the original, POF: Weeding out non-converters using Conversion Tracking post, the results are almost identical.  There were minute changes across the board, but typically you would expect the numbers to taper off pretty quickly, which is something you commonly see on PlentyOfFish.  As you can see this campaign was running strong for a total of three weeks.

I’ve decided to include an available download of my conversion breakdown spreadsheet if you’re interested in that again. Other than that, I’m not really sure what data you, my readers, would like to see.  If you have any requests or questions, please make a comment and I’ll post whatever you’re interested in.

If you’re looking for extra revenue, you might want to try targeting users with a Login Count between 50-100 or try using the IAB placements!

Well, this is definitely a case study my readers will appreciate and one that turned out very well.

I spent $260 just getting traffic for this campaign so I would be able to exclude certain, non-performing targeting criteria. I forgot to include in my original post that I was bidding 40c to get traffic, but I only received $10 worth of traffic. So I incread my bid to 50c to get traffic and I only spent $17 that day. Again, I increased my bid to 55c to get the traffic and I spent $38 that day and hit my campaign limit of $50 the next do so I let that bid ride out through the end of the campaign. The frequency cap was set to the default of 5 except for the last two days of the campaign, I changed it down to 3.

Below you will find tables that include the overall campaign results, the demographic breakdown and the conversion breakdown.

I’ve included a spreadsheet of the targeting criteria including the number of clicks, conversions and conversion ratios that you can download here. I’m going to exclude the following targeting criteria because either the conversion percentage was below average or the traffic was minimal.  These criteria are also in bold on the spreadsheet.

• Body Type – Big & Tall/BBW
• Drinking – Often
• Education – Associates Degree, Bachelors Degree, Graduate Degree and Masters Degree
• Income – 75,0001 – 100,000, 100,001 – 150,000 and 150,000+
• Intent – Putting in serious effort to find someone
• Marital Status – Divorced and Separated (targeting Singles only)
• Relationship (Search Type) – Activity Partner, Intimate Encounter and Talk/Email

The following criteria would’ve been eliminated, but I’m not given the ability to exclude these in the targeting on POF.  These criteria are also highlighted in gray on the spreadsheet.

• Drinking – NA
• Intent – NA

If you’re curious why I chose a particular targeting criteria and excluded it, please post in the comments and I’ll provide my reasoning.

Sorry everybody for the lapse in posts for the last month.  To makeup for it, I have a couple case studies coming…

I was looking back over some of my previous case studies in preparation for a new campaign I wanted to test out on Plenty of Fish and decided to start a new case study.  It will be extremely similar to the previous case study where I used POF’s Conversion Tracking Pixel to find out which users converted.  Except this time I’m going to figure out who doesn’t convert and make sure those users aren’t included in my next round of testing.

I’ve decided to use True.com from Revenue Ads.  It’s an offer that has performed very well for me in the past on multiple traffic sources.

Since this offer accepts 18-24 year old traffic, I’m going to target single, divorced, widowed and separated males who are 18-24.  I’m not going to split test which ad copy converts the best.  I’m trying to weed out people on POF that do not convert.  So I’m going to go with the ad copy that has worked the best for me in my previous two case studies.  The headline will be “Want a Girlfriend?”  The body will be, “Single women in {state:your state} are looking for guys. Sign up and meet them tonight!”  I’m also only targeting users who have a Login Count between 1 and 50.  The images I’m going to use are ones that have proven to garner a high CTR for me.