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

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.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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!
5. 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. =)

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.