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. =)

The real post is here.

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.

Just so everybody knows, PPV isn’t the easiest thing in the world to master.  I recently read a thread on WickedFire that made me realize something.  If you bid on anything on TrafficVance your minimum bid is $10 CPM.  This is because the minimum bid is $0.01 x 1000 = $10.

I also tested out a number of campaigns and failed miserably and lost hundreds of dollars.  So if you’re worried about losign a few hundred testing, this is not something you should try.

What I’m giving away here was my first profitable campaign on PPV.  I’m going to let everybody know just how I did it.

First thing I did was sign up on TrafficVance.  When you first sign up you will need at least $1,000 to get started.  So if you’re not able to blow some money, don’t try out PPV.

Next, you will want to go and download Laser URL.  If you don’t know how to use this program go here for Laser URL Tutorial Videos.  You will want to search a very closely related term to your offer using Laser URL.  I always let it search 10 pages deep on all three search engines.  This gives me a number of URL’s to prune and use for testing purposes.  Once you get these URLs, export them to a spreadsheet and then I suggest researching each URL to see if they even relate to your offer.  If they relate, it’ll be one of your targets.

I ran the Mobile IQ Quiz – QuizYou over at EWA.  I used Laser URL to search for the term iq quiz.  I of course pruned my targets and threw the list into TrafficVance.

My first time through I made sure I was the highest bidder on all the URL’s I targetted because I wanted some good test data.  I let it run for a couple days and came back to optimize it.  Make sure you’re tracking where your traffic comes from using the %%$KEYWORD%% variable that TrafficVance uses.  This way you can see which targets are converting and what the EPC for that target is so you can adjust your bids according.

After some time I was able to drop all the low traffic and non-converting targets down to about 10 targets.  The only bad thing about this was that I had to monitor these things day and night because I would get into daily bidding wars on URL’s, especially my best converting URL.  This got tiresome, I finally just got fed up with it and was okay with being in the 3rd spot.  I noticed more and more competition coming in on my targets and I was eventually being out bid on all my target URL’s.  The headache to keep up with these bids eventually became so much that I quit running the offer because of the increased competition and higher bids led to a dismal ROI that was no longer worthy of my time.

I came back a couple months later and noticed all the bids were much lower than they once were so I turned the campaign on and let it run for a couple days.  For whatever reason the offer was no longer converting on these URL’s so I paused the offer and haven’t ran it since.

My gross revenue for this offer was $7,144.00 and my total spend for this campaign was $4,867.27.  That equates to a $2,277 profit and a 46.7% ROI.

P.S. – If you’re going to run a PPV campaign, I suggest that your Prosper202 install be on a dedicated server.  I always suggest LiquidWeb for any server you may need.

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!