The MEGA CTR Guide! (Quadruple Your CTR & $$$) (52)
This is an overall guide on CTR. Everything you need to know, and every technique in the book, with examples for each!
First Some Info About CTR
I would honestly consider my greatest strength in affiliate marketing my ability to generate really high CTRs in images and landing pages (I'm best with images).
This skill alone is probably one of the main reasons i feel i succeed at a lot of campaigns. My conversion rates are similar to others running the same offer, but i can get my clicks so low that i'm able to break a a great ROI on the campaign. Others can always hit an amazing ROI on their campaign by tweaking landing pages 10+ times which allows them to achieve conversion rates higher then everyone else. There's tons of methods to increase your ROI, a high CTR is just my favourite.
For the newer affiliates here, CTR is essentially the amount of clicks you get on an ad or landing page / 1000. The higher the CTR, the more clicks you are getting.
When your have a higher CTR, you also get lower click prices. Most self serve advertising platforms will give you lower CPC's as long as your CTRs as high.
Keep in mind… high CTR doesn't always mean you'll have a more profitable campaign. High CTR often attributes to lower conversion rates, but it greatly depends on your image, campaign, if you have a landing page or if your direct linking etc.. so sometimes the image that's yielding the highest CTR isn't always the most profitable one. So make sure your tracking your images for campaigns so you know which have the highest ROI.
With that said, lets get into discussing every technique to get some mega CTR, because often the higher CTR on your ads + landing page the more $ you'll make. (I know it seems like i'm contradicting myself, but it goes both ways, so you always have to track, but usually a higher CTR will help your campaign!)
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Below are a mix of techniques to increase your CTR!
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Choosing Angles - Matching Images, Landing Pages and Keywords
Campaigns that are targeted will 90% of the time perform better in every way. To make a campaign targeted, you need to:
1. Figure out your demographic
2. Narrow down your demographic to be more specific (ie: instead of single women, single asian women living in new york)
3. Find out where your demographic hangs out online
4. Make an ad that applies directly to your demographic (So your ads should be catering to single asian women living in newyork specifically)
5. Figure out an angle to take that will apply DIRECTLY to single asian women living in newyork. It could be as simple as calling out single asian women in NY in your ad title, but you may want to be more creative
6. Find images related to your specific demographic, and figure out a creative headline/body that will also apply to your specific demographic.
*The thing is, sometimes single asian women in new york still is targeted enough, and you need to be more creative! How do you get more creative you ask? Well below are 3 examples.
example1
*from 'stackman' - Racing Auto Insurance
What i did was target younger people with auto insurance offers who like racing, supped up cars, fast cars, drifting, and 500+ other similar keywords. I targeted them using these keywords, and made custom ads and landing pages related to all the keywords above. This got me amazing CTR and conversion rates! I took this creative angle instead of targeting '26 year old women in Florida who want cheaper auto insurance'.
example2
*from 'sith005' - Mature Dating
For example, a while back I was pushing the Real Mature Singles offer (along with everyone else) and one of my angles was women interested in outdoor activities like hiking, camping, etc. I tested a ton of images ranging from just outdoors to men outdoors to women outdoors to couples outdoors, etc. For whatever reason the pics of women enjoying the outdoors got the best ctr. Conversion rates were kind of all over, and I didn't get that angle profitable so I killed it after about $70 which isn't a lot, but for my budget it was past the killing point. Conversely, I had an angle with women interested in New York Yankees and related terms. Here, men in Yankees garb (fans and such) easily pulled the higher CTR, but overall conversions were low.
example3
*from 'constantin' - Dating Facebook Apps
The ad was targeted to male cyclists and I was pushing dating app installs. I showed as much skin as I could get approved and as you can see It did pretty well. I could pretty much put up anything with a bit of skin and count on it being above .2 but because it was flirt, the account got canned soon after. still the CTRs were there and if i had a few more days it could have been VERY profitable. EPC was around .80 and my click costs on that 1 ad were at .12 and falling.
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Finding and Making Ads With Amazing CTR's
The simplest way to create high CTR Ads takes very basic photoshop skills. Most of the time though all you have to do is search, photoshop is rarely needed except for cropping. Impossible/wild/crazyWTF images = high CTR gaurenteed!
Searching for images
- 'Impossible/wild/WTF images' is exactly what you do to create high CTR. A lot of the time these images are done for you just need to search google images/deviantart.
For this example lets use: The Twilight Series
1. I'll have my base keyword "Twilight"
2. Now my target marks is girls 13-22, so I'll figure out what they like about "Twilight"
3. They like the male actors, the love story, the vampires. (I'll decide to go with the male actors angle for this example)
4. I'll create my main searching keywords now such as "Robert Pattinson, Edward, Taylor Lautner, Vampires"
5. Then i'll start with one keyword and ad verbs to the end, so I'll search for:
- 'Robert Pattinson crazy'
- 'Robert Pattinson wtf'
- 'Robert Pattinson fighting'
- 'Robert Pattinson weird'
- 'Robert Pattinson weird hat'
- 'Robert Pattinson bleeding'
- 'Robert Pattinson gun'
- 'Robert Pattinson kissing'
- 'Robert Pattinson club'
Think of keywords that are weird.. and add them to the end of your main keyword. "Things like blood, guns, and celebs bring in good CTR".
In this scenario i ended up finding pics of Robert Pattinson bleeding, and they got me some HUGE CTRs
Photoshopping Your Own Images
So lets say we can't find any good CTR images of Robert Pattinson... so you have to make some. This is purely where your creativity and knowledge of the subject your advertising comes in to play. This isn't something that can be taught, i can only show you examples of things Ive done. One of the best images I've created was 'Robert Pattinson kissing Taylor Lautner'. I know what your thinking, but if you want to make money, this is the weird shit you have to do!
- Why it works so well on Facebook is because it's so small. So when i created this image at 300x300 pixels roughly, i photoshopped it, cleaned it up and then sized it down to 110x80, you really have no idea whether it's real or not.
- All i did was: find an image of 1 of them kissing a girl to the right, and other kissing a girl to the left (or you could horizontally switch it in photoshop), then erased whoever they were kissing, made them face each other, cleaned it up a bit and scaled it down to 110x80.
THIS IMAGE BROUGHT ME CONSISTENT 1cent CLICKS FOR WEEKS!
- This image was an 'impossible image' Twilight fans see this and they're like "WTF!", so the CTR is huge.
Worth1000
For those of you who don't know the Photoshop world too well, there's a site called:
http://www.worth1000.com/
- This site hosts photoshop competitions, things like "Impossible Celebrity Couples, Impossible Animal Mergers, Celeb Jokes etc…" Example contests:
- http://www.worth1000.com/contests/26...rity-couples-6
- http://www.worth1000.com/contests/26...uble-headers-3
- http://www.worth1000.com/contests/26...are-my-pants-9
Why is Worth1000 Important To You?
Because they have a search function!! (make sure your searching under 'entries' and not 'galleries')
Another 2 sites to keep in mind for finding unique images are:
1. http://deviantart.com
Deviant art is a giant community of artists, photoshoppers, etc..
2. http://www.weirdworm.com
Weirdworm is connected to MGID.com and 2sleep.com which are huge 'weird image site databases'. All these sites offer is crazy image databases, and they make there images to send out as many clicks as possible to their partnership sites, so technically these guys are CTR experts! It'll take some searching to find what your looking for for your own campaign, but it's worth the time!
Random tip: The photoshop job doesn't have to be done well, sometimes shitty jobs will yield a higher CTR.
example:
Sick guide dude!
"This image was an 'impossible image' Twilight fans see this and they're like "WTF!", so the CTR is huge." - Spot on. The impossible angel has worked awesome for me on auto insurance.
Awesome guide man! I need to go over it like 3 more times. I'm honored to have a snippet in there too 
I will say, I followed that post from Vivid and I saw my average ctr on a facebook gaming campaign (primarily in-game images) jump from mid .1x% to the mid .2x%.
Awesome!! Stackman does it again!
Originally Posted by sith005
I will say, I followed that post from Vivid and I saw my average ctr on a facebook gaming campaign (primarily in-game images) jump from mid .1x% to the mid .2x%.
and good to know because I'm about to do a mega serious of blogging case studies comparing the CTR of different image styles! I have about 10 different techniques I'll be testing
Crazy post dude. Nice work.
wow definitely didn't expect to see my piece in there...awesome stuff. thanks for putting this all in one place!
Great post!
hella - super - huge - mega - content pack......with awesome sauce......thank you sir!!
Originally Posted by stackman
Another great way is to add tattoo's - especially on the chest area (how that for R-rated)
nice work thanks
MEGA Guide indeed!
This place is unbelievable!! $99 per month is a joke for real in the trenches info shared here...I personally think you should add a zero to the end and it would still be a bargain! In all seriousness man... Absolutely amazing sickenly good info Stackman...thanks man!
Originally Posted by illusive
enough already!!! Stackman, double the price for the forum
epic guide is EPIC, thanks!
titty power
Good stuff! One thing I always struggle with on fb when targeting is my estimated reach. Like for example, if you where to narrow target a niche within a particular city for lets say dating, it could come back like 300-10,000 estimated people.. And the click price is through the roof! Do you still run with it even though the reach is low like 2,000 people or would you try to go more broad?
WOW I needed schooling on ad creation and CTR! Thank you SO much for the tip on searching for impossible scenarios and creating images out of them.
good stuff thanks for the photoshop tips
this thread could win the cannabis cup
need to read this over and over to absorb it... WOW
sidenote --> these links don't seem to be working for me, shows: "You are not logged in or you do not have permission to access this page. This could be due to one of several reasons:"
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...w-CTR-CR-Stats
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...for-Higher-CTR
but i am logged in and i am still browsing through the rest of the forums
If you're idle for a while (like while reading a long thread such as this one), the site logs you out automatically - at least in my experience. You may have been logged out but since you hadn't tried to load any other pages, it didn't alert you to the fact. I tried the links you posted and can see the posts fine. If its not an issue of being logged out automatically, maybe try copying and pasting the links into your browser instead of clicking them?
working now with a different computer? weird... thanks anyway z6
@louie
A reach with 2000 people is probably too low unless your offer has a very large payout!
awesome post.
gonna read it daily for now
i shall commit my first post to this thread by saying awesome sauce.
You mentioned Userfly service allowing you to watch your interactions... don't pay for that shit. Load up Open Web Analytics on your server, a free open source alternative to Google Analytics it has built in Clickheat & records a video of every user that hits your page..
I love all your tips, you ROCK!
Oh man, this is the thread that gave me the idea of CrazyCTR when I first joined STM forums last summer, I wanted to automate the Photoshop tips that you gave here. However, I should have release it earlier but I was a bit lazy, I was busy with night clubs and chicks...hehe.
I'm going to make CrazyCTR a powerful optimization software, even if it will become successful or not, thanks to the creator of this thread
brilliant tips mate...thanks for sharing!
@crysper
That's super cool to know!
Originally Posted by stackman
Well since this thread was bumped, just goto say, epic info thanks!
Powerful stuff. Thanks!
Again a very nice post from stackman. Thanks for the whole suggestions. Especially the photoshop tricks prove how smart you are . About the analytics/tracking solutions, there is also piwik which may be suitable in some cases. I suggest to test both of them at the same time and see what works for you and dump the other one later.
that was amazing...I took a break from Facebook but your post has definitely inspired me thanks!
I've noted everything, thanks for the tips!
Scumbag CTR
Just to re-iterate how important some of this is, i use my own post and most of these tactics for a lot of mobile ads and landing pages i make.
It's a fine line of whats too much that hurts conversion rate and whats just enough "shock" to get people interested.
great post! thanks
Awesome Post Stackman!
Muchos Gracious. I still use all these techniques
Great post! Noted down all the tips on mindmap to improve my CTR. Going to try it soon and see how it will go.
LOL. This thread is like 4 years old ... and it is still better than 99% of stuff that self-proclaimed "online marketing gurus" post these days.
This is great!
To those that have used deviant art, how do we use artist images without being concerned with copyright? Can we purchase rights?
Only way would be to get in touch with the artist.
Most (99.9999999999999%) of affiliates wouldn't bother.
Originally Posted by zeno
,
Thanks a million 
this is awesome, I applied some of the techniques used here and my CTR(link) went up to 10%!! This post has honestly opened my mind.
Got some great tips. Thanks a lot
9 years have passed, but this is the greates CTR guide I've ever read... so straightforward!
Some things change, some others not!
If CTR is low, the solution is finding (or creating) the best attracting image... and by following these tips, it's not that hard!
Thanks stackman
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