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I'm back to Master Adult Dating in the Netherlands (19)

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Hi everyone,

I signed up 6 months ago on Stack That Money and I consider it my best investment ever. I learnt here the ropes of doing dating on Facebook and had some good time, until Facebook decided to slap me in the face (December 2013). That's why I decided to go back to school (read: STM) to master the adult dating niche. I've chosen The Netherlands as the playground, because I know the Dutch people, I know the language and thus I can easily create dutch banners & LPs. Last but not least, I believe the Netherlands is one of the less competitive markets.

I started this thread, because it is a way to NOT get distracted, to keep track of your progress and it is also a sort of commitment to at least try stuff for 30 days!


What I've done so far

• I've chosen a traffic source: ExoClick
• I determined the 2 best offers at the moment by spying on my competitors!
• I've decided to choose ONE placement to start with (NTV A on xHamster.com, 350x250 banners)
• I've paid close attention to the headlines (angles) my competitors use to come up with my own angles!
• I've also saved different banner ad styles and LPs as a starting point!
• I downloaded a 30-day-trial of Photoshop

I've also decided to test out 5 banners, 1 LP and 1 offer. I've seen the top players promoting offers that NO ONE else is promoting. I did some searching and found out that they are exclusively available at Advidi, but they have strict rules to join. For example, they require a minimum of $1500 in revenue per month. However, I think they are worth the try. After a week, if my revenue is enough to hit the $1500 mark without significant losses, I will try to sign up. I think these rules are a good thing, because the offers will not be quickly saturated this way.

I've accounts with ClickDealer and Adsimilis with offers that most of the other players are pushing. I think this will make it more difficult to get profitable, but I don't have any other options at the moment. The offer that I am going to promote pays a little $4 for a DOI registration. It has a consistent EPC of $0.7 over the past months (if I have to believe the newsletters), so it's worth the try.

I will work on making some banners and a landing page. With a bit of luck, I will be ready to launch my first campaign tomorrow.


Question's so far


I did some research on the bidding system of ExoClick. I understand that they have 3 types of bidding: CPC, CPM and smart CPM. I think the Smart CPM is a good option. If I decide to go with CPC, will I pay the same price for each click or are they determining the CPC in combination with the CTR?.

Last questions for now. What is a realistic CTR for a banner ad on a NTV A listing to aim for? And what is a realistic CPM to bid? The bid for the top position for NTV A banners on xHamster is at the moment 0.6$ per thousand views. If I manage to get a 0.3% CTR on a banner ad, this will mean 3 visitors per 1000 views. I will need 1 conversion for every 6600 views to break even this way, which means that every 20 clicks, 1 must convert. Is this generally spoken realistic? Or should I bid less than 0.6$? I'm afraid that I won't get a lot of volume bidding less.

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Why aren't you split testing between a bunch of different placements to get an initial idea of what does the best for your particular banners/angle?

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With CPC, you pay the same amount for each click. I don't like it though, because they "optimize" the number of impressions each ad gets based on CTR (so they make the most $$$...).

In theory that sounds pretty good, but they do it way too soon, so a banner could get no traction at all just because it started out with a comparatively poor CTR. I prefer the consistency of CPM.

I don't have any experience with XHamster in NL, but $4 for DOI sounds ridiculously low for a competitive placement like that. Maybe it converts like crazy though, I don't know...

In terms of CTR it's hard to make a general statement, but I think 0.3 is a pretty good ballpark figure to aim for on XHamster.

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Subscribed. Best of luck!

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subscribed!

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Subscribed! I'm actually doing the same thing: running adult ads on Trafficjunky aimed at NL. Nothing so far, but I'd like to see how you're going to be doing .

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I want to get one placement profitable first. I think NTV A is the best placement to get your ads profitbale as they are the most seen and next to the video. I think I will have a much harder time getting the footer ads, for example, profitable. Of course, I will let no placement untested, but for simplicity, I will go first with one placement.

Done. I will join after I am able to hit the $500 mark to get paid out.

Thanks. I know $4 is not a lot, but almost every dutch adult offer offers this payout at the moment.

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Day 1


It was difficult than I thought to make good looking banners. The past days I've been through a lot of Photoshop tutorials to figure how to make animated banners, how to adjust the time of the animations, how to get your text on all these layers and so on...

Then, I finally managed to make 4 banners..

I made my campaign in ExoClick and it got rejected, because one of the banners looked to much on Facebook. I used a blue headline and a white second line. Then, I removed that banner from the marketing material and re-submitted my campaign and got rejected again. Reason was a little but funny:



Then, I made a complete new campaign. My campaign got accepted and my first test went only yesterday, for 20 euros. I read somewhere on the forum here that ExoClick isn't using a currency converter so it's better to signup again and use USD as a currency, that way you will cut costs. I will try that one of these days.


These are the stats for day #1:

Clicks: 128
Costs: 25 euros (= approx. $$33 dollar)
Conversions: 1 conversion a $4.1 dollar

Revenue: - $29!

However, I found out that one images got a decent CTR of 0.24%. Other images had a CTR of 0.15%, which I deleted from the campaign.



Let's take alook at my lander.



Prosper202 reports that there were 150 clicks, but I only have 128 clicks as ExoClick stated. Prospers also states that 46 of those 150 clicks managed to get to the offer and just 1 signed up.

My banner headline, my LP and my offer are all connected to each other, so I don't think they didn't signup, because the banner, LP and so on are not related to each other. I will test this hypothese by adding another offer to rotate to rule out this one!

I wil also work on my lander, but I will first test out if this bad conversion rate has something to do with the offer!

There's plenty of work to do and because I'm not that familiar with designing banners, it takes some time to get 'em done.

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Day #2

Clicks: 267
Costs: 35 euros (
Conversions: 5 a $5.6 = $28 (= 21.28 euros)

Update: 1 Day after running the campaign, I got 3 extra signups so I made a total of $44 dollar, which is 34 euros and thus I just had a loss of just 1 euro!.



Losses: 18 euros (-50% ROI)

LP statistics

My LP CTR still is around the 30%.. 30.11%!

The signup rate on day #1 with offer X was 0.78%

The signup rate on day #2 with offer Y (kept everything else the same) was 1.872%


Using Caurmen's recommended Statistical Significance Calculator (this one) I can be pretty sure for 73% that the second offer is better than the first one. It's not very significant, but good enough for me to stick with the second offer right now!

Banner stats

I used just one banner that performed well previous and this time it had an average CTR of 0.25 which is good. It means that even if you have almost NO design skills, it is able to create banners with a decent CTR. With this CTR my average CPC was 0.18 euros per click. If I was running this on Facebook back then, I was now profitable like hell - so I have somehow to optimize the EPC and get profitable!

However, in the next couple of days I will test a bunch of other ideas that I have to see if I can attain a higher CTR!



What To Do Next

Next thing I've to do, is to test my lander. From all visitors it just sends approximately 30% to the offer. This could better. I'm aiming for an 50% LP CTR.

Keeping everything else the same, the impact of an 50% lander is as follows: Total Clicks (267, caused by an 0.25% CTR) x LP CTR (50%) x Conversion Rate (6.25%) = BREAKEVEN


This means I will completely destroy my current lander and will test a variation of the Map Lander (I can't find the thread, but it is provided for free here on the STM forum).

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Dude this is solid testing. Keep it up and you'll break through! This is exciting

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Okay, guys... Day #3 and I'm really excited, because it is the first day that I didn't lose money !

Day #3

Clicks: 333
Costs:: 47.13 euros
Revenue:: $75.5 (= 57.38 euros)


Profit: 10.25 euros

ROI: 25%!


LP Statistics

333 clicks in total to the lander and ultimately 157 people found their way to the offer. This means I have a LP CTR of 47%, which is a huge improvement when compared to the 30% LP CTR of my previous lander.



I also split tested two "offer pages", but it seems that there's no significant difference between those landers.

Offer page #1: 7 conversions
Offer page #2: 6 conversions
Total: 13 conversions

Banner Stats


I used the same banner image as on Day #1 and Day #2 and it had an average CTR of 0.24%. My average CPC ended up being 0.142 per click.


What To Do Next


I've found the best converting offer for me from the options that are available to me. There's just one offer from Adsimilis that I didn't test yet, because my aff link gives a 404 error. When that is fixed, I will test it against this one. It is from the same company, but there's a huge difference in payouts... The offer that I'm running now initially pays $5.6 and another offer from the same company pays at Adsimilis 5.6 euros (= approx $7.6).

That's the first thing I will do to optimize this campaign further. I contacted my AM to ask if it's possible to get a higher payout. He immediately changed my payout to $6. He told me that this is the best he could do for me, but I think there's more room.

My goal was to get a higher LP CTR and the first step was to take it to 50%. I stated earlier that I would use the map lander, but my Dreamweaver crashes all the time when I want to change the lander. So I ended up using another one. So the next thing to do is to improve this lander as follow:

• Add a map with some profiles to the lander
• Add a little bit of social proof (Facebook shares and Twitter shares to the page)
• Add a logo to familiarize the visitors with the offer!

If you have tips to improve the lander, you are welcome to share them with me and the other readers of course!

Lastly, my account balance is ZERO now - which is good, because I will setup a new ExoClick account. From what I've read here on the forum, the prices are the same in euros and dollars. By setting up an account in $$$, I will save a lot of money.

To give an example. Today I paid 47 euros in advertising costs. If the above described theory is true, with a new account my costs would be $47 which is approximately 35 euros. Thus, my profit would double from 11 euros to 22 euros!!


Questions So Far

Can someone recommend me a beginner's course Photoshop to me?

What is a realistic aim for CPC? CPC ranges between 0.14-0.18 per click. Is is possible to maintain an lower CPC on ExoClick?

Would you recommend me to test this campaign also on other placements than NTV A/B and other websites?

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Hey mate, congrats on your success so far.

In terms of PS, just google around and find a web design tutorial. There's a few where you rebuild a front page or landing page from scratch. That should bring you up to basic speed without all the bloat.

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We're partners with ExoClick (our tool integrates with them) and according to them, the notion that euro and dollar accounts are treated the same is false.

Euro gets converted into dollars when comparing bids, so you do not have an advantage there unless you're trying to game the system through some sort of foreign exchange method.. doesn't seem like it would be worth the time.

The only advantage is that the minimum bid for euro accounts is still 0.1 euro. So, when you convert that into dollars, it's like $0.14. So your minimum bid on euro accounts is higher.

In my opinion, no need to change to a dollar account if your home currency is euro.

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I'm not sure about this bro... I already have a new account and loaded it today with some money to test. I exactly copied my previous campaign with the same settings and prices. And I still pay on average $0.14 cent in stead of 0.14 eurocent. For every click I save 4 eurocent. Today I have already 416 clicks and thus I saved 16.64 euros!

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Awesome man! Keep it up

One thing I wanted to mention that I saw somewhere else on STM that I thought made a lot of sense (I also used to be on exoclick and bidding on xhamster so I know): Don't bid on xhamster. It's pricey, and there are a lot of regulars on there. Those folks don't click on ads as much as other, smaller sites.

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Photoshop tutorials: I haven't tried them, but I'd guess that Digital Tutors' Photoshop series will be good (paid): http://www.digitaltutors.com/softwar...shop-tutorials

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Well, I'll be honest we haven't tested this side by side, but your test is also way too small a sample size.

ExoClick explained to me that they were doing the currency conversion. And I imagine it would be a huge loop hole if they didn't take care of this as there are huge advertisers with euro accounts. I just doubt everyone is that stupid. I have no proof though.

Speaking of Photoshop tutorials, we do have some very good ones. Not full courses or anything, just the most important tricks:

http://ipyxel.com/category/tutorials/photoshop/

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You are right.. It could be just luck, but for me it is for more reasons better to pay in $$$, because I get paid in $$$ it is thus easy to calculate my profits/losses..

Thanks for the link btw that's exactly where I was searching for!

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You're welcome!

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