Recently I was flown out to Los Angeles by AKMG and was selected to give a presentation at Meetup202 LA.  The topic I chose was how to get started with buying banner inventory on websites.  If you read my recap you’ll know the story about how I was really nervous about it.  Smaxor being present didn’t help my nerves because I knew if I had any slipups, he would know.  But after it was all said and done, I handled it pretty well.  A lot of people came up to me after wards and gave me great information and let me know they gained some good information, which is was my objective in the first place.  So I considered it a success.

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.

A couple weeks ago the campaigns I was running all happened to die out on me, were paused or whatever.  Regardless of what happened, all my daily income was wiped out and I wasn’t too excited about it.  So I went to Azoogle looking for some niche dating offers because I’ve had success doing this in the past.  What I stumbled onto was an absolute gem and a few extra hundred dollars in the bank for very little work.

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!

Last weekend saw the final phase of my case study using POF’s conversion tracking to help turn a campaign profitable. Unfortunately, Phase 1 provided some skewed results because I tried to split $500 in testing between men and women and I only was able to spend $250 testing each gender. Simply put, that wasn’t enough and I realized it after analyzing the results. But, I took what data I had and went with it. Since I learned that $250 wasn’t enough testing, I decided to test the results of only the male gender because they provided the most statistically significant results. The campaigns didn’t lose as much money as the first round and none of the campaigns were profitable, but I’ll explain why it was my fault and what you can try to turn a similar campaign profitable.

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!

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.

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.

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.