• 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

Related posts:

1. Plenty of Fish Case Study: Session Depth
2. Plenty of Fish Case Study – CPM Bid Effects – Preview
3. Plenty of Fish Case Study: Session Depth (repost)

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.

Related posts:

1. Plenty of Fish Case Study – CPM Bid Effects – Preview
2. Plenty of Fish Case Study – CPM Bid Effects – Results
3. Split Testing on Facebook Case Study: Part 3

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!

Related posts:

1. Case Study: Using POF Conversion Tracking to weed out non-converters.
2. Case Study: Using POF Conversion Tracking to weed out non-converters – Phase 2
3. Case Study: Using POF Conversion Tracking to make a Profitable Campaign – Results

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.

Related posts:

1. Case Study: Using POF Conversion Tracking to weed out non-converters – Results
2. Case Study: Using POF Conversion Tracking to make a Profitable Campaign – Phase 2
3. Case Study: Using POF Conversion Tracking to weed out non-converters.

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.

Related posts:

1. Case Study: Using POF Conversion Tracking to weed out non-converters – Results
2. Case Study: Using POF Conversion Tracking to weed out non-converters – Phase 2
3. Case Study: Using POF Conversion Tracking to make a Profitable Campaign – Results

The purpose of this post is to let everybody know that my Guide to Buying Banner Inventory is now public information.  There’s a link in the menubar above, so you might have seen it before.  I just had it set to password protected to tease everybody for awhile.  I had a number of people contact me on AIM asking for the password so they could check it out.

I did let a handful of people check out the guide in rough fashion so they could check it out and provide feedback.  They pointed out a few things I’ve added to the guide, but for the most part it’s pretty much a direct copy of the presentation I made at Meetup202 LA.  A few of the people that have already seen it have used the tips I’ve given away to get some campaigns up and running.

For what it’s worth, I consulted with a few affiliates who I trust to get their feedback on whether I should turn this into an eBook and make some money, because this guide definitely gives out some great information that you can use to fatten your bank account.  However, I didn’t want to be labeled a guru or an eBook marketer so I decided to go the Nickycakes route and release it as a guide on my blog.

I’m sure there are some small parts I’ve missed, but I believe that I have covered pretty much what you need to know when it comes to buying banner inventory.  If you guys see anything that I should change in the guide, just make a comment on those pages and I’ll add it if necessary.

Without further ado, just click the link above in the menubar or click here for my Guide to Buying Banner Inventory.

Related posts:

1. Are you buying direct banner placements and having trouble contacting the site’s owner?
2. Buying Domains
3. $250 Worth of Media Buy Advice

I came across a campaign called EligibleGreeks.com.  It was a dating offer aimed at singles in Cyprus and the payout was a measly $1.45. So I went over to Facebook to check out the size of the demo.  Unfortunately there are only 15,100 men who are 18 and older, are single and are interested in women.  The highest suggested CPM bid was only 12c and that’s what I bid.  I thought to myself, if this demo converts it’ll be golden, so I threw up a few ads.

Due to the demo being so small, I setup two campaigns.  One targeting men who were 18-24 and only spoke English.  Within this campaign I only setup 3 ads because the demo was now down to 10,100.  The other campaign targeted men who were 18-24 and spoke Greek. I need some ad copy translated so I headed over to OneHourTranslation.com and had two ad copies translated.  This campaign only had a demo of 3,900, but I still setup 6 ads total with 3 images for each ad copy.

After the first day of testing, the English campaign had a CTR of 0.482% and the Greek campaign had a CTR 0.825% with 1 image having a 1.046% CTR and the worst image having a CTR of 0.749%.  Between the two campaigns I had an overall conversion ratio of 29.33%.  So I immediately scaled out the campaigns to the rest of the males and tried out the females aged 18-24.

I just let these existing ads ride out for a few of days.  I didn’t rotate in any new images or ad copy.  Since this campaign required no maintenance and I needed income, I moved on to getting some other campaigns up.  I let this campaign run for only 5 days because my offers came back live and I needed to concentrate on those as they were providing a much larger income for me.

There was a newer affiliate I had been chatting with every once in awhile lately and I knew he was really trying to get some stuff going.  I knew he was making a few bucks, but nothing to write home about so I decided to give him this campaign.  I took screenshots of my ads to show him the exact targeting for the campaign, including the ad copy.  Since he wasn’t already an affiliate at Azoogle, I told him to sign up under me so I could make a couple bucks off his revenue and told him to use his own images.  I knew he was into dating so I figured he had a few of his own that were good.

Since you’re all wondering how the campaign turned out, I spent a total of $55.29 and the revenue was $469.80, equating to a 749.70% return on my investment.  Not bad, eh?  The overall conversion ratio was 19.43% and the EPC was 29c.  I let the affiliate I turned the campaign over to let me know when he was done running the offer because I was going to make the post you’re currently reading, and out the campaign.  He also netted a couple hundred bucks off the campaign as well.

Unfortunately, the offer has been drastically changed in the past few days.  I think they changed lander, but I’m not 100% sure of this, they will only credit you for individuals of Greek heritage now and the payout was nearly cut in half to 75c.

Finding these untapped micro-niches can pay off so go find one!

Related posts:

1. Wanna dominate a micro-niche on Facebook?
2. Wanna make money in the dating vertical?
3. Facebook Christian Dating Campaign!

Targeting Criteria: Body Type – Average

Analysis: On my previous case study an average body type showed a conversion rate of 5.56% which was higher than average for the entire campaign in the testing phase. On this final phase these numbers held true and the conversion ratio even increased a bit. This campaign had the second most amount of traffic. The CTR was the highest of any of the other campaigns. If you were going to start a campaign, I would definitely include this targeting criteria in your campaign.

Targeting Criteria: Drinking Habits – Socially

Analysis: When I did my original test campaign, this criteria converted right at the same percentage as the overall campaign.  In this second go round, it didn’t fare so well and performed well under what I expected to.  This target criteria by far had the most amount of traffic available.

Targeting Criteria: Education Level – Bachelors Degree

Analysis: This target criteria performed the best in the initial testing stage converting at 7.61%, but it only had 7 conversions.  I had high hopes for this campaign and a little bit of worry because I wasn’t sure if the conversion ratio was a fluke.  And as you can the conversion ratio didn’t perform as well as I had hoped.  After the testing, it converted just under the average ratio for the campaign.  I’m also pretty sure the target demographic for this criteria is pretty small, hence the CTR dying out on all my images really quickly and most images not even being clicked on after a few thousand impressions.

Targeting Criteria: Income – $35,001 – $50,000

Analysis: This is another target criteria that was pretty risky.  In my initial tests it only had 7 conversions, but it converted at 5.22%, well above the campaign average.  After sending a fair amount of traffic to it, it converted even better than in my initial tests.  The only thing holding this campaign back from being profitable was the CTR.  I struggled with CTR in this campaign for a reason unknown to me.  I used what I thought were some of my best images at this campaign without any luck.  So if you know you have some images with really good CTR, this is something you might want to build into your next campaign.

Targeting Criteria: Search Type – Long-term

Analysis: This criteria converted right at the campaign average and I wanted a fifth criteria to test so I threw it in there.  Unfortunately, the campaign didn’t convert nearly as well as it did in my initial tests, which could be contributed to it only having 6 conversions.  These users seemed to be pretty click happy as it had the second best CTR of all the campaigns, they just didn’t convert nearly well enough.

Final Thoughts

The day after the campaign I received an email from Convert2Media that informed me the payout for Singlesnet 25+ was raised to 4.50. So you can take all the revenue figures here and increase them by 12.5%. It still doesn’t make any campaign profitable, but it definitely helps out quite a bit.

It would really help if Plenty of Fish could include the estimated number of people in our target demographics to give us an idea of how long we can expect our images to last before the users succumb to banner blindness.

One of my biggest problems with these final campaigns was choosing the correct images.  When I was running these campaigns I had numerous other campaigns I was working on so it was tough to keep an eye on these campaigns, even while using Mr. Green‘s POF Tool to upload new images throughout the campaign’s livelihood.  If you can keep your CTR up on your campaigns you will be way closer to profitability than I was.  I also have to fault myself for not split testing images.  I rarely ever do this and is one thing I need to severely address.  I’ve done this a few other times and I do know that images to play a role in the conversion rates.

There are a number of things you can take away from this case study.  By looking at the numbers above you can clearly see two targeting criteria that convert better than others, so try building those into your campaigns.  Maybe you can even combine the criteria and see how they perform together, but that will limit the amount of traffic you can get it.  Or you can do it the other way and exclude poor performing criteria from your campaigns.

If you use any of the tips I mentioned here and don’t mind sharing in the comments below how it turned out for you, please do!

Related posts:

1. Case Study: Using POF Conversion Tracking to make a Profitable Campaign – Phase 2
2. Case Study: Using POF Conversion Tracking to make a Profitable Campaign – Phase 1
3. Case Study: Using POF Conversion Tracking to weed out non-converters – Results

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.

Related posts:

1. Case Study: Using POF Conversion Tracking to make a Profitable Campaign – Phase 1
2. Case Study: Using POF Conversion Tracking to make a Profitable Campaign – Results
3. Case Study: Using POF Conversion Tracking to weed out non-converters – Phase 2

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:

1. Case Study: Using POF Conversion Tracking to make a Profitable Campaign – Phase 2
2. Case Study: Using POF Conversion Tracking to make a Profitable Campaign – Results
3. Case Study: Using POF Conversion Tracking to weed out non-converters.