Home > Adult Traffic (NSFW) > Follow-along Campaigns

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Breaking bad in 2014: Dating after dark (43)

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I'll make this post short but sweet. After being on POF for 6 months, I've decided to start the year off by making the switch to adult. I'm excited to see how the journey with this one goes. So with a pretty boring start to the follow along, I'm going to discuss my plans so far, which aren't particularly well planned out as of yet.

Tracking :: Voluum vs. CPVLabs

Unfortunately, leaving POF means I also need to leave behind the comfort of POFpro. I finally get to experience the joys of geo retargeting, and endless slews of work to set up landing page rotations, offer rotations etc. For this reason, I thought CPVLabs may be the way forward as it's the industry standard, and there are tutorials all over this forum on how it works.

Voluum has the advantage that it is (currently) free and provides no less of a service than what you get for $297 with CPVLabs. I'm just worried about struggling to learn the ropes with it.

Hosting :: A VPS & ... ?

For hosting, I currently have a VPS with beyond hosting. I've heard mentions of CDN's being bandied around although I'm not sure of how necessary one of these will be for someone who is just beginning with adult marketing, is this just for the benefit of the guys doing huge volume? Will a VPS be powerful enough to handle the volume from an adult campaign?

Traffic Source :: Juicy vs. TJ

Biggest decision of them all. I've seen people having success with TJ in follow alongs recently, but there is also a lot of mention of the source being very competitive and saturated. Juicy on the other hand is recommended by Finch as a great starting place for adult, but buying placements on websites for a fixed period of time has it's risks when you have no idea what you're doing!

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Competitive: TJ >Juicyads
Risk: Juicyads > TJ
ROI: Juicyads > TJ
Volume: Juicyads > TJ
Quality: TJ > Juicyads

Just my 2c...

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I've always used cpvlabs, I find it super easy to use and easy to manage my campaigns. Clean nice, one time price fee tracking/hosting is the backbone of your business, don't skimp on it.

VPS will work fine, speak to your hosting company about the volume of clicks you will be sending and the countries, if you're running INTL use a CDN, if you're running US plain hosting works fine. I used a VPS for a long time and it worked fine, but my volume was growing much larger and dedicated was the answer.

TJ and Juicy are not the only 2 sources you have adbucks, star-advertising, trafficforce, trafficfactory and couple others. TJ is very competitive, but its one of the highest quality sources and really easy to use (Self serve) juicy ads is a little different but if you find some good sites you can make some good ROI I guess it comes down to your budget mate

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Bear in mind that the STM Mobile Tracker can also do most of what CPVLab does, and it's free barring $25 for the MaxMind database.

You should be fine with a VPS for a while at least, although you should take care to get one in the same geographical area that you're targeting with your campaigns. Hosting your landers in the UK and running campaigns in Australia will have less ideal results

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Thanks for the replies guys. I took the plunge and bought CPVLabs, figured I'll never regret investing in good tracking. I did see the STM mobile tracker, although the thing that put me off was seeing that you needed to install the maxmind database which is not possible on my beyond hosting vps. I didn't consider until after, that maybe you have to do the same for CPVLabs to get redirects working correctly? Could someone please advise me on this?

I've also been spying on the competition today. I'm leaning towards TJ for my traffic source although I'm still very hesitant. I invested in a VPS and spied on some of the smaller countries for some of the websites that TJ have inventory for (Pornhub, spankwire, xtube, tube8) and it seems like across these sites, a lot of the ads I'm seeing are from the same guys (same domains for landers). Now, my logic would indicate that this means the traffic is untapped (which we can almost certainly rule out), or these are the big guys who have a competitive advantage (higher payout etc.) and they have upped their bids and forced the competition out of the door. Am I right in assuming this?

The placements I was looking at were the square on the home page, and the squares at the top and bottom of the video pages. I assume these are the ones that my ads will display on if I start with TJ?

My AM got back to me after I'd been spying and actually recommended a couple of other countries so maybe those ones are a bit less competitive, but at least I saved a few creatives and landers so I have an idea of what people are running.

All in all this still leaves me feeling unsure about TJ.

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CPV Lab once updated their platform the next day, president Kennedy was assassinated. Voluum is much faster and it offers live tracking, to be honest...my ROI went way up BECAUSE i switched to Voluum and started cutting out bad landers/banners immediately. Obviously people here will tell you CPV is wonderful and all (most haven't given another tracker a try and I was hesitant too until one day i had to wait 3 minutes to load up my campaign page) but I recommend you at least try a campaign on there and see how you like it. It does have its flaws, like... being hosted on THEIR server, so it's quite vulnerable in that sense....BUT, i like it and would NEVER go back to CPV.

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....Do people really convert when they have their ______ in their hand?

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Maybe they sign up with their other hand? Lol.

Interesting. I nearly did go with voluum but decided to stick with CPVLabs because of its reputation. I guess to start off with, I won't be running enough volume to save a ton of money by optimising instantly but I'll definitely check it out in the future. It's a shame there's no solution to the fact that it puts your data in a vulnerable spot!

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What do you mean live tracking? When using cpvlab, or p202, or imobi, or any others, its just a click to refresh the stats, no? Do you mean you just don't have to refresh the screen?

Does Voluum let you use your own domains for the tracking link? or is it just a subdomain on theirs?

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Here is the text from their domain page in the settings.

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Voluum Panel_1388949160615.jpg  Views: 131  Size: 37.3 KB  ID: 1757" class="thumbnail" style="float:CONFIG" />

That's what I mean ,and you can setup it anyway you want, i choose by offer name >country blah blah

I can see in realtime what's going on in ALL my campaigns at once and to cut out or swap a lander or offer takes me 2 seconds.

NOW also forgot to mention, their support is terrible so far, takes ages to even get a reply, to be honest I still haven't gotten a reply for a question I asked 2 days ago. I tried ticket system, contacting through STM... I hope that once they start charging they will hire people to work with support.

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Ok so with my tracking software chosen, I've also chosen a traffic source, which will be TJ.

The last few days have been spent researching, reading follow alongs, reading forum guides etc. and just really familiarising myself with what I'm getting into. I'm building plans of action on how many banners, landers, offers I'm going to test etc. There are seemingly so many variables in adult: Country, website, placement, image, banner template, angle, ad copy, lander style, lander content, offer - it really is no wonder that people say don't enter adult without a budget.

I'm wondering if I should stick to a couple of placements to begin with or go for lots of placements? I know people say spend x times the offer pay out on each banner/lp combo etc. so I'm just trying to pre-emptively reduce the insane costs which would be incurred if I were to try and account for every variable in this equation. Obviously it isn't realistic to spend so much testing each thing so thoroughly, and this is where guess work and assumption that winning combinations will slot together come into play.

Is bidding RON advised? I've seen pretty mixed opinions on this.

Also, is there any tutorials on this forum as to how to set up a CDN and how they work? There are plans like cloudflare which are free although I'm not sure how good this would be. There are also services I've seen charging for bandwidth usage, which seems like a bad idea, and something which could end up costing a lot of money?

I plan on buying landing page genius when I get some decent campaigns going to squeeze out as much ROI as I can. It looks good and I've seen it mentioned in some of the follow alongs.

Overall, my next steps of action:
Read the final few follow alongs I haven't read yet
Spy in the countries that my AM suggested to me
Choose a country to run with
Scour the web for as many offers for that country as I can find
Join TJ

After those steps, I will be ready to start building campaigns. My aim is to be up and running, or at least 90% of the way there on Wednesday night. I have a busy work schedule this week so this could be unrealistic, and potential stumbling blocks could be borne out of a lack of knowledge/experience with CPVLabs.

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CDNs: you probably don't need them yet unless you're planning to advertise a long way away from where your server is based. If you do need to set one up, they're usually pretty well-documented on the CDN's own site.

Don't worry about the bandwidth costs too much for paid CDNs: $39 will buy you 500Gb of traffic on MaxCDN, for example. If your LP is 100k, that's equivalent to 5,000,000 LP clicks. It only gets expensive if you're self-hosting video or something similar.

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I've signed up for one anyway, I'm doing international so better safe than sorry!

I actually signed up with rackspace and they were awesome, gave me a lot of info on how to use their service where a lot of companies would have left you to figure it out on your own, highly recommended.

As for my next steps, I've chosen a country, a decent selection of offers and joined TJ. Had a good immature laugh at some of the advertising guidelines before you sign up. One thing I am worried about is that they say they want ID from the models in your ads, is this really the case or are they lax with this sort of stuff? Also remember hearing a rumour somewhere that you needed to deposit $400 to join TJ, looks like that was a load of BS!

I'm very excited to start running with my first campaign, I anticipate that I will have most things in place by Wednesday, but things like waiting for translations etc. will probably mean I wont get running until the end of the week. I can't wait!

Next action:
Scour the spy tool a little more
Brainstorm angles and write ad copy
Choose banner templates
Choose lander templates
Look for banner images

I'd still like answers to these questions, if anyone could give some input I'd appreciate it:

I'm wondering if I should stick to a couple of placements to begin with or go for lots of placements? I know people say spend x times the offer pay out on each banner/lp combo etc. so I'm just trying to pre-emptively reduce the insane costs which would be incurred if I were to try and account for every variable in this equation. Obviously it isn't realistic to spend so much testing each thing so thoroughly, and this is where guess work and assumption that winning combinations will slot together come into play.

Is bidding RON advised? I've seen pretty mixed opinions on this.

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Couple of placements, test the waters see how your ad/lander/offer combo go. Keep it tidy in the beginning, you don't wanna outdo and end up confusing yourself mate. If you start to see traction on the placements, scale then and see if you can make positive ROI on some other placements too, but yeah definitely in the beginning start small and clean. I would test $50-100 shared on a Video placement and a topright placement. Adult is a volume game now, you need to see how your offers convert with traffic, I don't think the spend x offer payout works too well with adult. Just throw $50 tests

Depends on the traffic source, some RON sources will get you booted quicker then you can click pause on your campaigns haha, some are ok. Adxpansion RON stay clear XD

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Been hard at work over the past few days, I'm not far off being ready to launch. It was probably optimistic to think I'd be ready by Wednesday. Getting translations done, finishing off landers, finding more images etc. are all small things that need to be done but will probably take a few days to finish completely. New date to aim for is Sunday. The main thing is, I have everything planned; I know how many landers/offers I'm testing, I know which placements I'm testing, I know how many banners I'm going with etc. I know this thread has been pretty crap so far, but it's about to get better, I promise!

I'm sure you guys appreciate that this is a completely different beast to POF, and there really is so much more to think about and do. I will get used to the work flow with experience.

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proper preparation prevents poor performance!

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Smashing it mate, can't wait for some data!

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Really looking forward to hearing how you get on with this one!

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Me too, unfortunately there is a delay with my ad copy translations because the guy on fiverr who I asked to translate rejected the sale. I guess my copy is too vulgar? haha.

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Haha yeah I always tell the guy in a message that its for an adult dating website. Most of them still say yes, but I've gotten a "WTF is this shit" before LOL

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Funny stuff, just annoying when they take almost a day to reply only to reject it cos their little feelings are hurt over some naughty words!

Anyway, right now I'm basically waiting for stuff back from a few fiverr jobs and I'm almost good to go. My task list before launching is:
Finish the landers/ad copy once I have replies back with the correct translations
Scrape more images for my banners
Establish my initial bid
Set everything up on the confusing world of CPVLabs, which after having a mess around with it today, seems 10x more complicated than I was expecting!

Won't be long now.

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Banners done, now waiting on the landers coming back from my guy on fiverr.

Also quick question, can you set up a lander for multiple offers in CPVLabs? I'm wanting to split the young traffic and send them to one offer, and split the old traffic to send them to another offer. How can you set this up with CPVLab?

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You have to use Multiple Option Campaign. Put the "young" offer in option 1 and "old" offer in option 2. Then on landing page link like: trackingdomain.com/base2.php?id=1 (or id=2)

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And you can only use one offer per option in this way or can you have 2 "offer groups"?

Also what do you do with your young traffic? Send it to a separate network from your high quality traffic?

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Anyone got an answer to this one?

Also, never use fiverr, shoddy work and you really do get what you pay for.

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I'm fairly sure that you can only use one offer per option this way in CPVLab, at least without custom coding.

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Damn, is there any way to rotate offers in CPVLab at all? How are other guys in adult resolving this problem?

Also would you recommend having "30+ year old only" on my creatives?

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@davidal - you can either rotate offers or have multiple offers on the lander, I believe. It's just that you can't do both

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try odesk. You can get translation back faster. Fiverr is full of pansies who take days to translate 1k words. My part time employees write 6k words a day and my full timers 10k. I find it funny when someone says it takes them days to translate 1k words.

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How do you know? I didn't post any lander stats yet lol!

But yeah, I mean the thing with the landers is that they're all very much the same thing. I guess the angle varies a lot more so should be tested more thoroughly. Things just get a bit confusing when you're constantly split testing, and there are so many variables to test.

I think what I'll do is take the current winning angle, come up with 3 more, and get 3 more landers designed.

So I'm working with 4 angles and 4 landers, does that sound like a good plan?

I guess I need to work on my split testing game. I remember reading a blog post by Charles Ngo saying that split testing methods can be a competitive advantage and I can see why.

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How different are your LP templates from each other? Do they all use "Rules", for example? Do they have wildly different numbers of or placement of images or text?

It's easy to fall into the trap of testing very similar-looking LPs - my personal rule of thumb would be that if you don't have one LP that does utterly terribly on most tests, you're not testing widely enough Try some seriously crazy shit (with some thinking behind it, of course) - you never know what will suddenly bust out and work really well.

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Not very dissimilar, landers are next on my list.

Banner Blindness?

Some stats from the last few days:

Friday
ROI: 13.97%

Saturday
ROI: -10.77%

Sunday
ROI: 7.01%

Monday
ROI: -18.01%

Today (so far)
ROI: -35%

Thought I'd turned a corner at the start of the weekend but apparently not. Things are still really inconsistent, it looks like weekdays in particular are much more difficult to get profitable. There's also the chance that today's a bad day (which to be fair my personal opinion is that it is). Disappointing after optimising angles and templates. It's pretty much all I've been testing so far. Very small set of images has been used, so potential burn out could be causing this, but the EPC of the offer is lower today, so this suggests it probably isn't banner burnout right?

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Nothing I've done this week has went to plan and it's highly disappointing.

EPC's for the last week and a bit:

28/2: $0.21
1/3: $0.13
2/3: $0.12
3/3: $0.13
4/3: $0.08
5/3: $0.10
6/3: $0.09
7/3: $0.09
8/3: $0.08
Today (so far) $0.12

Am I being scrubbed from bold onwards or what? Seems like the average EPC has dipped massively.

After spending roughly $140 yesterday and only generating $67.50 in rev, I'm back to -50% ROI.

My optimisation process involved testing roughly 9 angles, with 2 or 3 of the highest performing images from my first batch of images way back when I started the campaign. I would test 3 angles and 3 templates at a time, and finally ended my testing with 1 angle and 2 templates which I wanted to use.

I've then created 60 ads (20 per placement I'm currently testing) with some brand new images tested with the winning angles and templates. I've also split tested a few landers with these.

Pretty much none of these ads have a positive ROI which is very disappointing to me. Not really sure where to go with this one now, maybe test a new offer. There is a DOI offer which has a good epc according to the network (better than what I'm currently working with) but it's DOI and seems a bit more mainstream than my current offer.

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Split test the same offer on another network and/or a completely different offer. Scrubbing after X leads is easy to spot by splitting across networks.

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Stats

I've been cracking on with this campaign and here are stats between Monday and Friday this week

Placement 1
Cost $480
Rev $358
ROI -25.64%

Placement 2
Cost $175
Rev $150
ROI -13.96%

Placement 3
Cost $140
Rev $165
ROI 13.95%


Placement 1 was great to begin with but has tailed off a lot in the past few days, maybe banner blindness, but after optimising the banners which are profitable are only at around 10% ROI. Placement 2, very similar story. Placement 3, most of the ads are profitable and I've barely optimised, I think I can do well with this placement but the volume is the least.

Very frustrating week as my EPC on Thursday was huge and I surpassed the $200 rev mark. Crazy considering I only just hit 3 figures of revenue last Saturday for the first time.

I've tested out some new landers over the past few days which I'm hoping will increase the performance of placement 1 and 2. I tested the landers across all 3 placements, and the winning lander yielded a roughly 40% higher ROI than the lander I was originally using. I've got that lander running on its own today but todays conversions are looking bleak so not sure what's going on with that.

I'm continuing to test new creatives as always, but at this moment in time, I feel like I need to split test the offer I'm running on different networks. It's something I'm unable to do at the moment though because I've just pushed for weeklies this week and my cash-flow is very tight.

I'm also tempted to try different traffic sources. I've just been checking out the CPM prices for placements on a different source, and the placement with the highest volume has a 10-20% (depending on which placement I'm comparing it with) cheaper CPM than what I'm currently paying on TJ. I'm tempted to port over some of my profitable banners and run on a few different sources, although I'm not sure if this would be recommended when I'm not even hitting overall profit on TJ?

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Better get it profitable on TJ first in my opinion.

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Yep, I'd agree. Keep focusing on the one traffic source - you're clearly doing very well with TJ, and as you say, you're still squeezing more ROI out of new lander tests, new banners, etc.

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I wouldn't say I'm doing very well with TJ, the most worrying thing for me is that I don't have any very "strong" creatives (best performers are around 30-40% ROI after significant spend), and my ROI is still typically red (although close to break even) even after so much optimisation.

My issue is that I have a handful of winners, maybe 4 at most (some do not have significant enough data to say for certain) which I would trust to make consistent profit, this is after roughly 100-150 tested. If I run with just these banners, and (in a perfect world) they all perform similarly well across each placement, then realistically how long can I expect those banners to perform to a high standard before banner blindness kicks in? A week or two? I'm already frequency capping at 1 per day, but I fear this will still not prevent burnout.

I then have to go through the entire rigmarole of testing more banners, and most likely sacrificing my positive ROI as my margins are too thin to still make profit while testing lots.

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Are there any general rules you can derive from looking at what works and (equally important) what doesn't work? That'll help you get future banners into profit faster.

Also, obvious questions that I'm sure you've thought of - have you split-tested enough offers, and have you tested your best offers across a few networks?

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Today I've uploaded more ads which are a bit more diverse than what I've previously tested.

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Stick or twist?

I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to proceed with what I'm currently doing.

The offer I'm running, I just can't get profitable. I'm not sure if I'm being scrubbed or what, but it's the only offer in this country that converts decently and is easy to stay on without getting booted for quality. My only option for improving the offer is by split testing across different networks, but in this case if I am getting scrubbed, surely the EPC would ultimately end up the same when they start scrubbing just as hard elsewhere.

I could spend hours testing slightly different ad copies, call to actions, different lander variables etc. but is it really worth it for the extra 10% ROI it might yield? I've cut my volume to about $60 spend per day after really struggling to get anywhere with one of the placements, and with such a low spend, is testing each variable over such a long period of time going to be time effective for me? 80/20 rule and all that... My point is, I feel like I've optimised a lot of the main components and I'm still not profitable, what hope do I have of reaching 50+% ROI with this?

Things seem to have ground to a halt, and I don't think I've made progress over the last week since I hit my $200 revenue day, in fact in many ways I feel like I've regressed, only hit $50 revenue today.

I'm waiting for a payment through from having trouble wiring money to me, but once I receive that my budget should be roughly $3000, which is about $200 per day if I'm on weeklies NET 7. I can't help but feel I should just turn my back on this campaign and go to a higher volume country, maybe France, or a smaller English speaking country like the UK or NZ.

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Have you talked to your AM about this? They may be able to offer a pay bump or have a word about the scrubbing if it's happening, particularly if you say "if I can't solve this, I'll need to test other networks".

It is DEFINITELY worth testing ad copies, CTA, and so on. Look for things that move the needle significantly and you won't need that much data - if you're looking for a 10% boost in ROI minimum, you can test with a few hundred LP clicks per lander. And ROI improvements of much more than 10% are possible with split-testing even in the smaller details.

Are you using a rules lander? I'd guess so - if so, make sure you're tracking Javascript interactions too. It may be that one of your "rules" is hanging people up.

Hope some of that helps!

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