Adult Domination 2014 (or Die Trying) (11)
Hi all
We're two blokes in the UK who've quit our jobs and decided to turn our attention to AM (so we had better make it fucking work!).
We're both fairly technical - happy in PHP, ruby, analytics platforms etc. We also know a few guys who've 'made it' - now we want in.
Decided to do a follow along as it seems a great way to get some feedback from you pros.
Day 1: Spend:0 Revenue:0 CR:0 Clicks:0
Notes: Took longer to get started than we planned. Got CPV etc setup. Hosting, emails etc. Standard IT issues that come with new infrastructure.
We're gonna focus on Adult/Dating for now... Already got in on a couple of networks and applied for a bunch of offers. Chucked $1000 in exoclick so we HAVE to spend it! Deployed a cheating housewives USCAAU campaign using F5 and exoclick - only spending $20/d atm as we're totally expecting to get something wrong and lose it all.
By the end of the day we were getting exciting as some test data started coming through successfully. Going to watch over the weekend and hunt for the mistakes we've made.
Subscribed 
Good luck!
Sounds interesting. Good luck!
Looking forward to seeing how this one comes along!
Howdy gang!
Day 2 (really day 4 ugh):
So... 4 days later we are not in the position where we're spending our time spending money split testing, creating new campaigns and optimising. We're still battling with getting our Exoclick account approved. Finally got it done after sending over various proofs of address, etc etc and got a campaign up and running woo!
Spend: $45
Revenue: $6
CR: 0.12%
eCPC: $0.055
Clicks: 822
ROI: -86.7%
Goal: see if our tracking works (accomplished!)
Targeting: RON, Daily budget $20, Scandinavian countries
2 Creatives, 1 lander, 1 Offer
Round-up:
- Exo click spent $25 over our daily budget: be careful of this
- got some advice on next steps: Target one site in Exo, bid for premium placements NTV A,B, scrap CPC and bid CPM.
Day 3
OK now feels like we're getting down to the nitty gritty of what we're supposed to be doing - got some decent looking banners/landers from the spy tool (based on popularity), and created some similar banners / landers. Upload to Exo, got approved (y). First thing i noticed is that my budget was dribbling out at $1 every 2 hours which made me want to cry. After about 6 hours i lost patience, and started upping the bids by about $.10 every hour until i hit around $0.9 and then the budget spent over the course of a couple of hours.
Spend: $25
Revenue: $0
CR: 0
eCPC: $0.78
Clicks: 32
ROI: -100%
Goal: Find some moderately well performing angles/landers/banners combinations
Targeting: Premium, xHamster, Scandinavian countries
Round-up:
- CPM bids were INSANELY high (up to $1.6)
- Stats were too low in number to really rule out any LPs, Banners
- Exo click spent $5 over our daily budget...
- Got some advice on next steps: Bid for premium placements NTV A,B, scrap CPC and bid CPM, rinse, repeat, optimise, abandon Exoclick and go to Traffic Junky.
NB: For the record Exoclick support are actually really helpful however, it could be anywhere between 1-4 days before we get a response. This has gotten better the more conversations we've hade though. They eventually refunded the overspend and said we can have our remaining balance back at any point in the next 6 months if we want.
If you have a larger budget, I would split test between more placements and sites. Just randomly picking one and hoping that works isn't the best way in my opinion. AdultAdsPro can also show all the placements' exact ROI's and automatically filter out the poor performers based on thresholds you set without you having to monitor those stats.
Originally Posted by ffclogin
Stop targeting xhamster. The chance for you to succeed is higher on other sites/placements. Target sites with more organic traffic (from search) will yield you better results. xhamster is just over-saturated and a lot of repeating porn viewers daily.
Another tip for you, when you are targeting a premium site with shit load of trafffic (eg. 1m+ impression per day), don't bid at what their recommend bid is. Since your budget is low, just start at $0.20 and adjust accordingly until you see traffic coming in.
Third tip, build creatives that is similar to the site that you are targeting. You'll gonna see better results with it.
Good luck!
Originally Posted by risingchamp
Hi all
Few days of catch up below... looking forward to hearing your thoughts
Day 4
Submitted a new campaign to exoclick using our own landing pages. Actually proved a very useful exercise anyway just to learn about CPV anyway. Resubmitted the campaign with a very glamorous ad and a very unglamorous and squashed one just to see what does best - keeping open minded!
Spend 0
Revenue 0
CR 0
Clicks 0
Day 5
Weekend passed with nothing from Exo, chased and they need proof of domain - just waiting on that...again... Arghhh lost time! Killing the time with some affiliate ebooks, strategising and thinking of angles, getting creatives together etc
Spend 0
Revenue 0
CR 0
Clicks 0
Day 6
Finally got approved by exo. The test campaign kicked off and even though we set $20 limit per day it spent $45 in 10 seconds. Apparently if you target too much traffic your limit won't be respected! FUCKING HOLY FUCK! But learnings: 1: Target less traffic for test campaigns. 2: Make better use of CPV labs for ad rotation.
Spend $45
Revenue $4
CR 0.0012
Clicks 834
Day 7
Ran 8 banners on xHamster with 3 LPs and 3 Offers in rotation. Exo was recommending a $0.10 CPM bid however, only getting about 1000 imps per hour at that bid. Started playing about force refreshing the pages etc in the individual site bids table and min bids were at $1.60 for CPM on xhamster!! Exos stats are very weird, they don't show up half the time and when they do they're all over the place. I upped the bid to about $1.5 just so i could see if it spent my daily budget (of $20) and yes... it spent $25.26 over about half an hour. Avg CPC ~$0.81 
32 clicks total, no conversions, 12 clicks through to the offers
Spend $25
Revenue $0
CR 0
Clicks 32
Day 8
Struggling with what to do to make the most of our traffic. Had a good chat with Manzie - recommended giving Traffic junky a go for a bit more control. Cheers Maynzie!
Spend 0
Revenue 0
CR 0
Clicks 0
Day 9
Got a TJ account, cloned our campaigns from Exoclick into TJ, awaiting approval. Noticed one of our offers is going to someones private landing page from a couple of the networks. Seems either hacked or the offer is suspended or something. Really worrying actually as there was no warning or anything - would dread to think what could happen if you were dropping 4/5 figures a day in spend! Have switched out the offer to another network
Spend 0
Revenue 0
CR 0
Clicks 0
Day 10
Bid on multiple TJ sites across multiple placements and set the bid and slowly incremented it until we got some traffic going. The footer areas seem to get all the traffic whereas the premium video placements have rather high bid prices. Finally we started getting some impressions and got some actionable data back. One of our creative-lander combos got both of our conversions so we've decided to optimise off of that.
Spend 0
Revenue 0
CR 0
Clicks 0
Day 11
Having found one combination that seemed to work (LP CT of 30% to 60% at times) we cut back the rest of the ads/landers and tried to manage the bids pretty closely as well as timing and day specific bids. Quickly realised that some days are massively better than others but for some reason the whole campaign just seemed to tail off when we focused on the evening. Odd.
Spend 100
Revenue 50
CR 0.3%
Clicks 446
Day 14
Ok, discovered that the TJ timing of ads is in EST but our geo are many hours ahead of that - hence why our evening bids weren't working. In the meantime, we now know we need MUCH MORE TRAFFIC (but not quite as quickly as our first exo campaign) so we've put together LOADS of new creatives to try out, we're looking at other geos to run at the same time and we're also setting up about 10 times the number of spots to bid on - big scale up
Spend 0
Revenue 0
CR 0
Clicks 0
Day 15
Spent the day setting up the new ads and bids on traffic junky. We've also bought into a LOT more spots. It's been a very slow process and It's going to be much more expensive per day but we've had several days recently without any spend and we now figure the more we do at once the quicker we learn. Fingers crossed.
Spend 0
Revenue 0
CR 0
Clicks 0
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