Balancing ROI with Longevity (adult niche) (21)
Hey guys,
I've said this to myself too many times before, but I think I'm on to a profitable campaign.
Considering how much damn work was involved in getting this to where it is now, I would REALLY REALLY hate to see the campaign "burn out."
So based on my studies, there are supposedly a few of these that cause campaign "burn out."
- Banner blindness - either you oversaturate your traffic sources or it gets copied by newbs
- Landing page blindness - much less likely to happen compared to banners I assume
- Offer burnout - too many people pumping the same offer after a while
So, banner blindness. How do we fix that? Instead of just hammering 1 to 2 top performing banners over and over, diversify it with 5?
That means test the fuck out of banners so that you get 1 or 2 really awesome banners and also include another 2 banners that are still profitable but maybe only half as much as the top 1 or 2 banners? Instead of a campaign burning out in a month, maybe it'll last 2 months? Just theories I'm coming up with.
Now for landing page blindness, I feel that I may be in a good place. I've seem competitors with unique landing pages pimp those hardcore for many months on end. I have a unique landing page completely designed from scratch by my own 2 hands that seems to be killing it with initial testing. So let's just say I have a winner, how long can I expect it to last in the adult space?
Now for offer burn out, I have an offer that's direct to merchant and its not on your typical CPA network. This buys me more campaign longevity for sure. But with all good offers, it eventually burns out as you scale and others start pimping the same offer. So what do I do? Should I simply milk it out and once I start seeing it slip, replace with other offers that are comparable?
Also, another way to increase longevity is simple to scale right? New website targets means new audiences and fresh eyeballs. Right now I'm only on one site. Needless to say, I will be doing this regardless to milk my campaign as much as humanly possible.
Long post, hopefully some of you super affiliates can shed some insight!
One advice I can give you based on my experience is to refresh banners every 2-3 days.
I know it's a lot of work but that's the name of the adult game atm.
As for offers , unless you are getting scrubbed I wouldn't worry much.
I have been running some offers for 1-2 years now and still convert decently.
Let me ask you this, would it be better to constantly rinse and repeat banners on the same placement/site or would it be better testing these on other placements/sites?
And for banner refreshing, do you mean test new images or a completely new banner (new images/copy)? I'm think banner angles last longer (the copy) and I would just refresh the images (the women) or change up the fonts and colors.
It depends on the campaign though too, I've found that my WAP campaigns, once you have scored some paybumps from quality last longer then my web campaigns and there is not as much rotation needed. The offer burnout is overrated I've seen same offers up for a long long time, some have burnt out yes, but there are staple offers that never seem to go down. Keep on keeping on im sure you'll find the sweet spot.
Originally Posted by itsjustbrian
As for banners, no need to change angles very often, pics and colors will do.
Yeah I change up the images, colour and positioning (horizontally flipping my best performing images costs zero time or money and often works as well as a new image).
Also make slight tweaks to your terminology.
If you've got a banner like, "Moms that love sex", you can bust out slight variants: "Sex-loving moms", "Moms want to fuck", "Moms need sex too"
As the guys creating these banners, we tend to overestimate what it might take to get a user to look again. Because we spend much longer looking at them. You only need a couple of minor changes to recapture lost eyeballs.
And I wouldn't exactly consider it time-consuming. 15 minutes a day? You'll do well to spend 15 minutes making as much money doing something else.
Adult dating is an extremely time-consuming niche - my advice is to improve your systems.
Hint hint: Hire and train someone that can find pics, create ads, & upload it themselves every 3 days. This free you up to optimize landing pages, bidding, and handle the relationships.
Holy shit guys, you are all absolutely right about refreshing images. I just got a bunch of new ads in there and check this out.
All the red ROI banners were ones that have been running almost a week... clearly doing terribly.
Crazy, I like what you said about building a process Dr Ngo. I'll definitely have to do that soon if I can get consistent profit with what I'm doing.
Banner blindness and saturation is your main issue. Landers last months if not years. Offers - once quality checks out - can be the same. If you have something unique (lander or banner wise), don't expect it to stay that way.
rat has had chat landers running since mid 2011 to the same offer.
Once you have a banner 'style' or template that converts, build process's & systematize their refreshment, uploading, and optimization. This will create some relative stability, and less swimming against the tide. For the most part as others have mentioned, in terms of creative, this is mainly a matter of updating the picture.
Misc tips:
- have 1 or 2 testing sources (ie. don't test every variation of every banner on every source, country, offer etc)
- find a 'style' that works. stick with it. if you find a certain picture variation of that style works, then hammer that (eg. anime, girls with tattoos, 3some pics etc)
- do at least twice weekly refreshments. Aim to cut down to your top 5-10 banners minimum (never 1 or 2).
- do a major cut on Friday. you want your best stuff running hard for the weekend. Sunday will be your strongest day, so if there's a day when you want to be watching your bids, that would be it.
- Use spy tools to source top animations/pictures. Just slot them in your banner style. (as a side note, something that worked well for the alliance was morphing a clothed amateur to a shot of her naked. see xham amateur gallery, search clothed unclothed)
- Use spy tools to source your refreshment imagery/animations. There's no need to reinvent the wheel.
- Build your process. Teach a grunt to do all above for you. The time spent doing this, and learning how to train someone will be THE SINGLE most effective thing you can do in your affiliate career.
^ Nice tips!
Do you guys think that US Adult requires fresh banners more frequently? Like every day?
Cuz, yesterday, I uploaded some banners and they immediately started kicking ass. Today, they are performing half of what they were yesterday.
I get the bigger and more saturated markets get banner blindness the fastest eh? I am not scare of the work, and I can eventually hire a guy to help with the creatives. I just want to make sure I'm on the right path to profit!
Doubtful.
If you did it later in day yesterday you would be hitting prime conversion time (EST 5pm +). Whereas today's stats are heavily skewed by early morning, midday deadtime. People are bored at work and clicking, but they're not signing up.
This is why I'm loving plug rush and zero park for adult.
The campaigns are easy to refresh on plug rush as all you need is a good image and some text.
Zeropark is domain traffic so no images needed!
Originally Posted by cataclysm1987
On another note, as someone with experience, rat's post contains some really solid tips that aren't often covered. I'd only disagree about relying on spy tools too much. There are certain aspects of other banners that are worth getting inspiration from, but finding your own new images or coming up with a system for finding new potential images/banner styles is far more powerful than taking too much from others.
Originally Posted by itsjustbrian
And by changing I don't mean go copy some banners out there and replace the old ones. They have been already used , you need fresh new ones.
Try changing colors / images , that will do.
Originally Posted by dusklife
Yeah, I always come up with my own stuff based on inspiration of course. I have a pretty good process for getting high converting images and I figured out some unique copy angles on my own. They just seem to burn out fast in like a day.
For the longest time, I kept thinking it was day parting or my landers weren't good or I just had to optimize the angles.... maybe the problem the whole time was banner freshness. And if I look back at all my campaigns, a reoccuring theme is new banners performing better than old ones. You guys have help me see that and hopefully that really is the case.
I'm going to spend the rest of the week refreshing banners every day or 2 and see if I can get most consistent ROI from that. If not, I'm going to have to kill this campaign and work on a new one, because it just keep eating a hole in my bank account.
As of now, I've probably spent close to $4,000 dollars on this and only got $3000 back. I want to fucking profit man!!!!!
in my personal experience, English banners do in fact burn out much quicker than banners in Europe. (I have some banners in European countries that I've been running for about 8 months...and still converting well so..)
>>Also, another way to increase longevity is simple to scale right?
yes but building a maintenance team around a profitable collection of campaigns that handles banner refreshes, testing new angles, blah blah is the best way to go
then you just focus on launching more campaigns or opening up your main campaign on more sources (before the maintenance team takes it over )
There's no reason why you have to run a successful campaign every day, all day.
I think a lot of affiliates get tied up on this idea that they should be earning a consistent figure (XXXX/day) from now until the end of the time. It rarely works like that.
Not every campaign is suitable to run 24/7. I have at least a dozen campaigns in my portfolio that I only run for 7-8 days per month, usually on the weekends. If I were to run them constantly, they'd die out quickly.
You should test what happens when you run:
Campaign X: All week, top 5 bids.
Campaign Y: Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Highest bid.
A fresh, converting angle unleashed on the weekend will often make you more profit over 7 days than a campaign that runs all week. It will also last longer.
Very interesting point Finch, never thought about it this way. I just used day parting to weed out negative ROI days, not thinking that focusing on the top days could also potentially increase overall profit due to the reasons you mentioned.
Definitely something I will put more emphasis on in future tests!
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