Getting Ready To Start! :) POF Newbie (3)
Hi all,
First off, awesome forum - so much value here. I've been immersing myself in it for the last few weeks and I'm almost set to start my first campaign. However, I have three questions I hope you guys can help me with (any other advice is also massively appreciated)...
1) My account manager at A4D shortlisted some offers that she said are performing well. One of those is 'AsianBeauties' with a CPA of $5. In the terms, they state that the publisher needs to get approval of any creative that isn't part of their official pack. Is that normal? They have over a hundred creatives. Should I just use / test those or should I get approval for every image I create? Or perhaps look for another deal that doesn't have this requirement?
2) As advised in the beginners tutorial, I'm getting started on POF and have been trying to use the spy tool. Caurmen recommends that we look for ads that have been running longer than 10 days. So is that 'days seen' or 'tot days'? What are 'tot days'? When I searched for 'Asian', some ads have 'days seen' and 'tot days' exceeding 60 days!
3) This offer seems completely designed for men, however, I've read elsewhere on this forum that if you only send men to some offers you can get kicked off. Can anyone see that being an issue here? I haven't checked out the POF targeting options yet but I guess I'll be targeting men that are looking for Asian women and then test different age groups and other criteria...
Excited to hear the expert advice! 
1) Creative approval is very common. Advertisers want to protect their brand and prevent legal issues. For example, you use intellectual property of a competitor in your ads. The competitor could sue the advertiser you are running traffic to as they are effectively using the other companies IP for their profit. Whether it was you making the ads or them doesn't matter - they can still get in legal hot water so the advertiser will often want to vet creatives. The affiliate network similarly wants to protect their relationship with the advertiser.
I would recommend using your own creatives and getting them approved. Stock creatives rarely work that well and have likely been used before, a lot (= banner blindness).
2) I think days seen = how many individual days the ad has been seen on. If the person is day parting then in a week the days seen may only be 5 as they didn't run the ads Sat/Sun. Total days I believe = how long ago the ad was first seen. So, ad was first spotted 4 weeks ago = total days 28. Ad was run Mon-Fri = 5/7 days a week. Days seen = 20. (Disclaimer: I don't use the PoF spy tool).
3) Woman are generally of higher lead quality to dating advertisers. This is only a generalisation. If the offer is designed for men looking for Asian women then obviously it is probably going to convert men better and likely has a backend funnel designed for men. On more generic offers you can send female and male leads but would definitely want different offer landers for each (no point sending a hetero guy to an offer page plastered with other guys...).
For some offers the females may work out much better for the advertiser - this is where in many cases labeling your traffic with subids and communicating with your AM is critical. If the advertiser doesn't like your male traffic they can ask for it to be paused while your female traffic flows like liquid $$. Dating is unique in that the advertiser likely knows your traffic age/gender due to the signup process so the subids are not as important. However, in other verticals it pays to compartmentalise your traffic to not give away details but make it straightforward for the advertiser to say A = bad, B = OK, C = excellent keep sending that shiz.
Thanks a lot zeno, that's valuable info. I'll post a follow along soon - hope to get my head around the tracking stuff next 
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