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Dating campaign burned out, what to do next? (28)

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Hello,

I ran into a problem with one dating campaign and would like to hear your opinion about what to do next.

It's a niched SOI dating offer, traffic source is exoclick, running on about 8 premium spots, NTV A or B.

After some optimization I found 1 LP (rules type variation) that was giving me the best result, 1 offer url and 5 banners that were showing good results.
I was running positive ROI for about 10 days straight, then the conversions started to decline. I did small changes to the LP (new headline, new photo) and introduced 2 new banners, while cutting the worst performing of the previous 5.
Conversions returned, but the CVR was not so hot as with the original setup. After another 10 or so days, the conversions went to shit and I started loosing money. I did some changes to the LP again, tried new banners but this time Im not able to bring the conversion back, they are coming in but the ROI is not there.

I tried almost 20 new banners already, played with the bids, introduced new LPs - different styles, different headlines. I also tried new angles on the banners and LPs, but still cant get it back to profitability, even tho I got a small paybump on the offer.

I struggle to find a reason for this and cant figure out how to resurrect the campaign to reach positive ROI again.

What do you think could be the reason?
My AM is telling me the offer still works well on their network, so I assume its not a scrubbing issue.

Is the niche of the offer a problem? Could it be "burned" out after those 20 days and wont work anymore on the same spots? So lets say its a MILF offer (which its not), could it be that the visitors are tired of the MILF angle banners and wont subscribe anymore? BTW : I still get OK banner CTR.

I also checked the competition, to make sure Im not outbid by competition - Its the case indeed on some spots, but on some spots I still get the fresh impressions as Im high in the chain. I tried to raise bids on the spots where I was outbid, but it didnt help either.

Really dont know how to get around this - should I simply let this niched offer be for a while and return in two weeks for example? Or should I continue testing with different angles/banners/LPs?

What do you guys do when something like this happens?

Im pretty frustrated by this, after 3 months or so of testing, I was finally coming close to $200 profits per day and now Im back at the starting line so to speak

Any suggestions are appreciated.

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BTW : forgot to mention one thing, I took the campaign as it was to TrafficJunky to see whats gonna happen and it somehow works there, the LP ctr is strong and so are the conversions, but the higher click price lowers the ROI a lot, but Im still positive on there.

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I'm afraid my best recommendation is to start some new campaigns. Use the same offer, but try some completely different angles.

All campaigns burn out sooner or later.

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Isn't 10 days too fast, considering it happens not only on one placement but multiple ones and all during the same time frame 9-10 days per placement?

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i don't think offer pages burn out that noticeably that quick, but if it's an adult offer there's a high chance your affid is just getting a higher scrub %

also AMs will almost always tell you that any offer with any sort of revenue is crushing it on their network, as long as it converts and they're seeing revenue, they want traffic to it, they have no idea if the guy doing 1k / day is making 900% roi or -50% roi testing but they assume it's crushing it

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There are two reasons I can think of but can't point just one based on your description.

Banners burning out or offer CR going down ( scrubbing , backend changes etc etc ).

As Caurmen said I would just move on, looks like you already did what you could.

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I dont think its scrubbing, because the same offer with the same funnel is selling fine on traffic junky, just exoclick traffic went to shit. Truth is that I have all sources marked with subids, so they could theoretically scrub on just some subids.. is that possible? But in case its not scrubbing, it must be the banners then, or maybe LPs, but I dont think an LP can burn out that fast, especially seeing how everyone uses the same LPs over and over again ... or am I wrong?

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Might just be the banners going stale if the sites have a lot of repeat fapsters.

Pause it for a few days and when you restart it try a real low freq cap of 1 or 2/24. You can also try running it on random days and times. Then make up the lost volume with the new campaigns on TJ.

I've got a couple of exo campaigns that I have to run like this but the eCPAs are remaining constant, so I'm happy. Spending time on other sources ends up being more productive than trying to keep the things alive with fresh creatives every day.

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Try all banner SIZE available for your targets. Also popunders and redirects.

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Sorry for bringing such on old thread to life.

But I am curious @matuloo after six years since your still in the game, what would be your answer to your own question? Have you found the solution after all these years?

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I suppose that many answers on above questions are in this thread written by matuloo but I'm also interested what he thinks about it now.

Btw. When I see topics like this, created in 2014 by such experienced and great AMers like matuloo I remember that everyone started somewhere and you just have to keep going.

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Ah wow, it's funny to see such an old thread of mine, I still remember the struggle I've going through at that time.

I moved from the SEO world so I knew very little about paid traffic and the affiliate networks out there.

This particular offer that I mentioned was a SOI dating offer in the BBW niche, targeting US and UK.

Eventually, I was able to stay on this offer and made quite a lot of $$$ with it... I kept on promoting the same offer for a couple more years actually, it wasn't always performing well, so I had ON and OFF periods with it.

I had to do a few things though Let me tell you the whole story, so you get an idea of what is needed sometimes.

First one was finding the offer in different affiliate networks. The one that I started with, that I was using while writing the original post, was paying me $2.7 per desktop lead. Later on, I found 2 more networks that had it. One gave me a payout of $3.20 straight away, the other one took it even further, to $3.30. This simple change kicked me into small profit quickly. So the first problem was that the original network I started with, was taking too much of a margin.

After a while, I realized that one of the 2 new networks was scrubbing harder, so even with the higher payout of $3.30 I was making less. So I decided to stick to the one with $3.20 payout.

I sent them about 700-1000 leads on a daily cap of 100, then they raised it to 150 leads per day and gave me another small bump to $3.40 I think, it's been a while ago so don't remember exactly but it was something like that.

Everything looked perfect, but then the advertiser told me to stop sending traffic due to low quality leads... I was quite upset about it. However, I was able to make a deal with the network, they allowed me to create a new account, so I could try the same offer again. Which meant I had to go back to the $3.20 payout.

I cleaned the campaigns a bit, got rid of the most misleading creatives and started to test slowly again. After about 2 weeks of sending 50-100 leads per day, I got the green light from the advertiser, my daily cap was raised to 700 leads and I got a small paybump again. I scaled as much as I could and I was able to reach about 500 leads per day.

At this point, I said to myself that I probably have good funnels and know how to run the offer, so I went direct with the advertiser. I was lucky to hit a good AM who wasn't afraid to let me test on larger scale and the best part, he gave me a starting payout of $3.80. With some optimization and proper setup (passing of placements IDs) we were able to up the payout to $4 per dekstop SOI lead... which is quite nice rate for US and SOI.

Later on, I also tested revshare and PPS with them, but most of the profits were made with the SOI option.

What did I learn from this?

1. Not all networks are the same, that was the biggest breaking point in this case. I went from $2.75 to $4... thats a HUGE change.

2. Not all traffic sources are the same... I started with exoclick in this case and while it's a good source, the simple fact that they buy traffic from 1000s of websites simply mean that the quality is not consistent. In the end, it was easier to work with traffic sources that have less placements but consistent quality, at least until I got somehow stable quality and was able to optimize properly.

3. Not all banners are meant to work for a long time... as carvaggio mentioned, I summed a lot of the answers in the thread he linked. And it's still true to this day. Some banners simply aren't strong enough to prevail, they work for a while but then stop. Even for this particular offer, I had to find the right female models to use in banners. Bigger part of the profits I made with it was from banners that used 1 particular model... in various poses, outfits etc, but still just the same one model.

4. Not all LPs are the same... I experimented a lot with the copy and layout and even though the "rules & questions" LP was the clear winner, I had to modify it in order to reach the results I was aiming for. Back then, everyone was using the same questions... I came up with my own set of questions that were different from what everyone else used and that was another breaking point for me. Many affiliates copied this from me later on and I can still see my own questions being used on LPs left and right.

5. Every offer goes through Ups and Downs... as I mentioned, I kept on using this offer for years, but it wasn't ALWAYS working. Sometimes I had to pause it... at some point it was so popular that everyone was promoting it, so the saturation was high. There were some tech problems too, they had billing issues a few times... every offer goes through these stages, so when something stops performing, it's time to move elsewhere, even when just temporarily.

It was an interesting ride for sure, I learned a LOT with this particular offer

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Oh yes, we've all been there

It's not easy to start in AM... and I already had a ton of AM experience, just not with paid traffic, so for me the transition was not that hard as I already knew pretty much everything I needed to know about websites, how to build them and I had a good understanding about the online marketing world. Must be way harder to fresh newbies to make it. But you see, those who don't give up can still become successful

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Good lesson!

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Great write up Matuloo!

Quick question, aside from switching networks, do you think your landing page tweaks had the biggest impact to your ROI?

Sometimes I feel like I don't split test my landers enough.

For example I'll find a lander that is "decent", but I guess to squeeze out that extra 10-20% I should probably work on my landers more?

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also you should check your traffic sources. nowadays is lot of bot traffic also. i always set one sub ID for each source and automatically compare the performance of them so if something shady is going on or a traffic source is saturated i switch.

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Interesting @matuloo, sorry if bringing back this thread embarrass you. But the lesson is we all start from somewhere and being newbies and persistence is very important.

Basically getting the high payout turned around this campaign? Also just curious, what types of offers are you promoting heavily these days? Do you still mostly do SOI offers or have switched to PPS/Rev share?

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I think that in this particular case, it was like 30/30/40 pretty much.

I got a big boost from the payout bump, then the LP tweaks ... but I'd say the biggest impact was from the specific model I found. Once I made banner with her, it was like a game changer... suddenly all the sources started to bring positive ROI.. it was like a miracle That was when I learned how big of an impact banners can have

But the LPs had a big effect too... not sure if I'd say 20% but a proper LP really helped a lot.

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Sorry??? Common, this is the best thing you could do... so many people think there is some magic involved... let's show them I was a paid traffic noob once too


I outlined the breaking points above already, but for the other part of your question : I focus on DOI now. Less quality problems than with SOI and easier to manage than PPS or revshare.

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Hey mataloo, just wondering how different it is running DOI vs SOI. I've only run SOI, but I'd imagine you'd require a larger testing budget, and there will be a larger gap between time of first click, and conversion time.

Sent from my YAL-L21 using STM Forums mobile app

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Thank you @matuloo

So can you say after all these years, there is still something new for you to learn each day when doing adult media buying with dating? Or once you get it the process is just the same, you just rinse and repeat? Would it be boring now compared to like when you were still struggling 6 years ago?

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If I can join to long list of questions to you matuloo, I wanted to ask about one thing too

When payout is much lower on some (popular) network do you still test them? Right now I test one offer and it's big difference like $1.4 vs $2.6. I run it with $2.6 and CR is quite okey. Wondering if such big difference is also what usually we should split-test. Because $2 vs $2.3 - okey I get that one network could scrub harder. But in this case difference in payout is big.

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Usually the DOI payouts are higher, pretty much always actually, so yes, you need a bit bigger budget to test properly. But the difference is not that big.

Most of the conversions will happen within a few minutes on DOI too, I was expecting to see a bigger gap myself. It's true that with higher volume you will see a decent amount of conversions come in later, even on the next day or several days later... but it doesn't account for a large % of the overall conversions.

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The core remains the same, year after year. But there are always some changing elements that you need to follow... rules of the networks are changing, new LP types/variations, offers come and go, new GEOs open up to dating etc... it's never totally stale. But from the most part, yes, it's mostly about the rinse&repeat approach

Boring? Yup, it can get boring, but everything will get boring after a while But the AM industry offers all kinds of opportunities, so if I feel bored, I can focus on something else. So when PUSH came along, for example, I jumped on it. When carrier billing was hot, I was doing that... and when that new thing gets saturated, I get back to dating. Then there is STM stuff that keeps me buy... so nah, I don't feel bored at all

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When the payout is THIS different, there is likely some reason for it. It could be some difference with the flow, the required targeting might be different or its a desktop VS mobile offer... One way or another, I would still test it, just to see why it's like that.

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Thanks for sharing your experience Matej.

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You're welcome, it was quite interesting to see an old thread of the newbie-me

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You're welcome, it was quite interesting to see an old thread of the newbie-me

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