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

Riley Pool — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 05:48:17 +0000

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

Riley Pool — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 09:04:44 +0000

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

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

Male Ad Copy

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

Female Ad Copy

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

Riley Pool — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 02:12:26 +0000

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)

Riley Pool — Mon, 24 May 2010 04:39:37 +0000

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

Session Depth 1 – 10
Session Depth 11 – 20
Session Depth 21 – 30
Session Depth 31 – 40
Session Depth 41 – 50
Session Depth 51 – 60
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.

$250 Worth of Media Buy Advice

Riley Pool — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 05:07:04 +0000

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 buy and it ended up costing me my entire investment because of it. You live and you learn. Thankfully, it wasn’t an expensive buy and I will chalk it up as a $250 lesson learned in media buying.

I was wanting to promote a niche dating site and I thought I had found the perfect site to contact for a direct buy. After a few back and forths with the domain owner and we agreed on a flat fee of $250 for a 30-day long run of the site. I was going to share the banner inventory with another banner, so I would see half the site’s traffic. When I asked how much traffic his site received, he told me, “[Sitename].com gets around 3000 unique visitors per day.” and “The site gets around 300000-350000 impressions on average monthly.” After my 30 days was up, I ended up getting a total of 17,398 impressions, resulting in 86 clicks and 0 conversions. I have run this offer for well over a year now and the average conversion rate I see is 12-18%.

So here’s my $250 worth of media buying advice to anybody who is about to do their first buy.

Check the demographics of the site you’re interested in buying banner inventory on. Use Quantcast, Compete or your favorite demographic website. Even these results will not be perfect. Your best bet is to ask for a media kit, if one is available. Make sure the demographics match what works best for your offer.
Whenever you ask for the amount of traffic a site has, ALWAYS ask for proof of this. Check the website’s source code, see if they’re using any type of analytics tool, such as Google Analytics. Ask for a report of the last 30 days worth of traffic, at least.
When scouring the details of this traffic report you just asked for, see if you can determine where his traffic comes from. Is it type-in traffic or is it from organic search results? If it’s a bunch of type-in traffic, you can probably bet that your target audience will develop banner blindness quicker.
While you’re still analyzing that report, check which countries this traffic is coming from. You better make sure the traffic comes from a country that your offer allows!
Finally, do some math to find out how many conversions you will need to be profitable. If it was a flat-fee per month, it’s easy to figureo out what it will take to be profitable. If it’s a CPM buy, calculate how many conversions you will need per thousand impressions to be profitable. Using data from other traffic sources, about how many clicks does that translate too? Using that information, what CTR should you be expecting? How do these figures relate to other traffic sources you’ve tested? Does it seem realistic that you might be profitable? I hope so!

P.S. Yes I’m a fucking idiot for not doing proper research. Thanks for noticing. =)

Plenty of Fish Case Study: Session Depth

Riley Pool — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 00:12:22 +0000

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

Session Depth 1 – 10
Session Depth 11 – 20
Session Depth 21 – 30
Session Depth 31 – 40
Session Depth 41 – 50
Session Depth 51 – 60
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.

Plenty of Fish Case Study – CPM Bid Effects – Results

Riley Pool — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 02:15:03 +0000

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.

Campaign with 15c bids		Campaign with 25c bids
Impressions	39,728	Impressions	65,592
Clicks	41	Clicks	57
Avg. CTR	0.103%	Avg. CTR	0.087%
Total Costs	$5.96	Total Costs	$16.40

Leads	4	Leads	6
Conv. Ratio	9.76%	Conv. Ratio	10.17%
Revenue	$11.60	Revenue	$17.40
Profit/Loss	$5.64	Profit/Loss	$1.00

Campaign with 35c bids		Campaign with 45c bids
Impressions	278,539	Impressions*	447,061
Clicks	283	Clicks	413
Avg. CTR	0.102%	Avg. CTR	0.092%
Total Costs	$97.49	Total Costs	$201.18

Leads	21	Leads	22
Conv. Ratio	7.98%	Conv. Ratio	5.58%
Revenue	$60.90	Revenue	$63.80
Profit/Loss	($36.59)	Profit/Loss	($137.38)

* 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.

Plenty of Fish Case Study – CPM Bid Effects – Preview

Riley Pool — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 13:30:33 +0000

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.

Split Testing on Facebook Case Study: Part 3

Riley Pool — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 08:45:27 +0000

This is a follow-up to Split Testing on Facebook Case Study: Part 1 and Split Testing on Facebook Case Study: Part 2.

After having 2 sets of images have their CTR die out on me I got lazy and tested out another another ad copy and saw my conversions tank by 54% so I figure the ad copy had to be misleading. So I decided I wanted to try out 5 completely different sets of ad copy and see the difference between their conversion rates. I tried to relate each ad title with the description. I used the same images as my first go around so I know they can perform decently and since I haven’t ran them in awhile their CTR should at least be respectable now.

Here are the stats for the last 7 days according to Prosper.

Ad Copy 1 (Original): 8280 Clicks, 438 Conversions, 5.29% Conversion Ratio
Ad Copy 2: 12612 Clicks, 498 Conversions, 3.95% Conversation Ratio
Ad Copy 3: 441 Clicks, 9 Conversions, 2.04% Conversion Ratio
Ad Copy 4: 323 Clicks, 10 Conversions, 3.1% Conversion Ratio
Ad Copy 5: 721 Clicks, 34 Conversions, 4.72% Conversion Ratio

I found it pretty crazy that my original ad copy converted best for me after the split testing I did.

So here’s concrete proof that split testing makes a huge difference! If you’ve never split tested your ad copy, DO IT NOW! I’ve never done much split testing of ad copy until I ran this campaign and have finally came to an amazing revelation, even though I should’ve known it.

On Facebook your CTR depends on the image you use in your ad copy. Your conversion ratio depends on the text in your ad copy! It is imperative to split test both!

Split Testing on Facebook Case Study: Part 2

Riley Pool — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 08:23:28 +0000

This is a follow-up to Split Testing on Facebook Case Study: Part 1.

Okay so the CTR began to die out on the images I found in Split Testing on Facebook Case Study: Part 1. I was still making some pretty good money off this campaign and decided I needed to switch up the ad copy. Me being pretty lazy I went to the merchant’s landing page and used some of the lines that caught my attention in my ad copy and mind you since I was lazy I only used one variation and scaled this out to every demographic. After about 5 days of continually submitting ads I finally got my ads past the review team at Facebook. I just knew I was going to kill it again for a few days and wasn’t sure what I was going to do after that, probably try a different ad copy.

So I threw up this one ad copy using those images I used in the first go round. I figure they haven’t been shown in a couple weeks, they should have some juice left in them. Plus with some new ad copy I should be sitting pretty.

I ran it for a couple days and lost a nice chunk of change, mainly because my conversion ratio had tanked by 54%. I’ve included screenshots below. And that amount of data was more than enough to be statistically relevant. My first concern was since I haven’t ran this offer in a few days maybe the advertiser was up to no good so I hit up my affiliate manager and asked him if the conversion rate for the network as a whole changed and he said nope. So I was thinking since the only thing that had changed was the ad copy, maybe the ad copy was now a bit misleading because it did include that the user could win money.

Part 3 I will be split testing 5 different sets of ad copy to determine how it affects my conversion ratio.