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

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TrafficJunky Adult Campaign Follow-Along (20)

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So I've been attacking TJ for a bit of time now, and have spent around 3 grand so far learning the ins and outs of the system (ending up a bit under breakeven which I guess isn't so bad), testing pretty randomly to be honest. I'm starting this follow-along to be responsible and keep me on track. I don't think I've ever been quite as frustrated with any traffic source as I am with adult.

I am going for a European country (non-english), and my server is based here in the U.S., although I have a CDN, not sure how much of a difference or impact it makes but it's worth a go.

My landing pages seem to peak around the 30-35% mark (depending on the banners as well) in this country so I'm just going to pick one and stick with it as the conversion rates all seem to be around the same mark as well.

My current setup is as follows:

3 Placements: NTV A Spots on RedTube, PornHub, and YouPorn. The country doesn't have a huge deal of volume so I'm looking to expedite the testing process by using all 3 to test different angles.

Each placement has 2 angles, 10 banners per angle for a total of 20 banners per placement. I'm mostly looking to find a winning angle and not necessarily winning banners.

Bidding into the top spots, 1-3 (changes according to what other people are bidding and all that), and running at a frequency cap of 3.

The story so far: I've had winning single banners before, but whenever I tried to run them after culling ads, they performed much worse. And this was after around a week of testing and well over 3x the offer payout per banner so it looked like the winning banner had statistical significance, but when it was by itself in a campaign it immediately performed worse as soon as I culled the losing banners over the testing period. For instance, during a week of testing, one banner performed much better than every single other banner, with a conversion rate of 5% from the total clicks. As soon as I culled the rest of the banners, the very next day this same banner dropped to a 2% conversion rate. It didn't change during the following days I left it up just in case that was just one bad day. This has happened multiple times now so I figure you need a group of winning banners in order to get consistency in adult.

Landing Pages: I've been using ripped landing pages that I've modified, image/headline and body text, and have also compared them to just the same landing pages that I see people running every day as a baseline and 30-35% seems to be the max LP CTR in this country, at least with the banners I've tested. Even so, it seems that LP CTR can vary wildly day by day, especially when the volume per placement isn't all that big. There were three "types" that I tested: one was the typical big picture of girl on the left, 3 questions on the right. The second was with video and a small blurb with questions underneath. The third was a simple one with a background of 2 women with 3 questions in pretty plain text. All the landing pages I try to pre-qualify the user by asking if they are over 24.

Offers: I've found a good offer with a pretty decent payout, I see the offer being pushed by a few affiliates and I've split tested a bunch of offers and this one has given me the best results as of yet.

Angles: So I'm basically using a couple of different banner styles/angles that you see all the time, along with completely new styles/angles that I'm pretty sure will bomb but I feel I need to compare something original with something others are doing.

The typical angles being, "Better than xxxx", "Older women want blah blah men", "Join this find and fuck site" (except not in English)

I'll post stats at the end of every day and try to keep myself accountable.

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zzzzz.... Where's your creative spin? I've seen those angles 999,999 times before. Spend more time on your angles!


Or settle for mediocrity.

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I agree with you, those are the angles I'm using as a sort of baseline. I have my own angles that I just didn't outright say what they were, as I am testing 2 angles per placement, one original, and one I see being pushed all the time.

And you've seen those angles 999,999 times? Stop watching so much porn man!

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Results after today:

YouPorn NTV A Placement:
Spent: $17.90 (Bid of ~.76)
Clicks: 48 for a CTR of .21%
Revenue: $7.5
Total: $12.4

PornHub NTV A Placement:
Spent: $21.30 (Bid of ~.55)
Clicks: 90 for a CTR of .24%
Revenue: $15
Total: $6.30

RedTube NTV A Placement:
Spent: $11.80 (Bid of .66)
Clicks: 43 for a CTR of .24%
Revenue: 0
Total: $11.80

Takeaway for the day: Nothing major yet, started somewhat later in the day so can't make any rash decisions yet. Doesn't seem like any of the angles are really gaining any traction. I had better results just throwing up a bunch of random ads and picking and choosing what converted best, but the problem of having them decline in performance immediately after culling all the poor ads leaves me to test and find a trend that works so I have multiple ads going at once that all perform well.

One thing I've always noticed is that people bidding into the top spots very rarely, if ever, have frequency caps of greater than 1 or 2. I'm not even entirely sure the people bidding high enough to be in the top spots are affiliates themselves. Might be wise to test out lower bids instead of paying this much for the clicks I'm getting. Although that might just leave me without any volume at all.

Things to think about: I'm wondering how many ads are good to keep going at the same time in a winning campaign, might take forever to find 5-10 decent ads that are all profitable. And are people bidding into the top spots only to get an idea of how their ads perform and then switching placements/traffic sources to cheaper ones or sources with more volume at a more reasonable price?

Also if anyone is currently doing TJ and is in the same position as me with almost being there but not being able to quite push through to consistent profits; I have tons of notes from running campaigns and would love to share them if you can share your experiences and data with me. I would share everything and expect someone to do the same in a collaboration of sorts, nothing big, just 1 or 2 people to share with.

Also thinking I may be testing too many ads at once. An angle can probably be tested with a few ads as opposed to 10 per.

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Looking forward to seeing more stats. I'd say work on getting your banner CTR up. I think if you find a winning angle you will find that most of your ads in general will perform pretty well.
For me personally I just started trying out 5 ads to test an angle and it has been good so far.

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Not just porn, but everywhere! Although I don't do dating or adult, I even started out with almost the same angles as those in another vertical.
But that's good to hear. Angles are what will make or break you. No matter the vertical.

Today's recommendation - if you haven't already read Finch' blogpost on angle creation. Create your angles so they tap into the eight life forces:
http://finchsells.com/2012/06/13/ang...our-campaigns/

Looking forward to your results

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Yeah you're definitely right, not sure I'm a fan of having so many ads running at once (10+), especially in a country with small amounts of volume. Today will be a better assessment of the data though since the campaigns will be running for a full day, so we'll see!

Yeah I think one of my main problems so far with adult was not giving angles as much attention as they deserve so that's definitely something to work on. Finch has a great blog too so I'm glad you linked that. It's funny, because when I was doing well on PoF, that's all I was thinking about, the next angle, the next niche, it seems that I kinda lost that thought process since moving on from that source, which isn't a good thing!

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Results for today (March 14th):

Placement 1:
Spent: $21.20
Revenue: $8
Total: $13.20

Placement 2:
Spent: $22.10
Revenue: $15
Total: $7.10

Placement 3:
Spent: $31.60
Revenue: $53
Total: $22.6

Takeaway for the day: So I got rid of the angles that were just clearly not working halfway through the day. 10 ads per angle is a lot, and they generated enough clicks where I could tell if they would profit or not. I see a lot of promise in one set of ads that were profitable today, as shown in placement 3. Time will tell if they can hold up. If they don't hold up, I'm not entirely sure what to make of it, because ads don't usually die out on a daily basis right? For that particular set, I have multiple ads that are profitable so hopefully it stays that way tomorrow. If it can't stay profitable on a Saturday, I'll be pretty ticked off, not gonna lie.

Things to think about: Playing the adult dating game has a ton of variables in play that can all affect your outcome. One of my biggest pet peeves is not really understanding at the moment how your place in the bid queue can affect conversion rates. A TJ rep stated that even if you're not at the top of the bid order, your ads still have a chance to show up first, just less so than people with higher bids. So it seems like a give and take, you pay less for impressions, get less quality but should still make up for that loss in quality with cheaper impressions, but then you have to worry about losing volume. I'd also love to just have 2 campaigns on the same placement, one with a low bid, and one with a higher bid but that test wouldn't work for a few reasons.

1) The ads would show up first in the higher bid campaign and a user would have already seen them by the time the lower bid campaign shows and skew the response rate.

And 2) According to TJ's rules: "To preserve the quality of our bidding platform, ads across multiple campaigns triggered by the same targets on a Zone or Geo Zone will receive the same treatment as a single campaign on the zone giving multiple campaigns no advantage."

So I'm not entirely sure how to test this aspect quickly, apart from testing a high bid for a week and collecting data, then using the same ads for the 2nd week at a lower bid and then collecting data.

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Woo! Great to hear you're doing this - and don't stop testing new styles/angles if the first few don't do so well.

Have you tried testing a lower frequency cap, as you suggest? It's by no means a certain fix, but it's another variable to consider.

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I'm in a similar position and I've had to take a step back. I dont understand how people spend $30 a day in adult and can come to any conclusion to do anything. There was a time I was spending $40 a day and I realized that gave me little to no data to work with on a daily basis.
I've been saving my $ up so I can spend $100/ day to get some real data to work with and make changes faster. You dont want to be in a position where 1 or 2 conversions will change your entire game plan.
Checkout this article that changed my mindset.
http://adultmediabuying.com/affiliat...unky-campaign/

At least with a higher adspend you can test more angles faster. I think this is how the math works out

3x payout per ad, per lander, per offer assuming a $3.00 payout

Angle 1

Banner A > Landing Page 1 > Offer 1 = $9.00
Banner B > Landing Page 1 > Offer 1 = $9.00
Banner C > Landing Page 1 > Offer 1 = $9.00
Next
Banner A > Landing Page 2 > Offer 1 = $9.00
Banner B > Landing Page 2 > Offer 1 = $9.00
Banner C > Landing Page 2 > Offer 1 = $9.00
Next
Banner A > Landing Page 1 > Offer 2 = $9.00
Banner B > Landing Page 1 > Offer 2 = $9.00
Banner C > Landing Page 1 > Offer 2 = $9.00

That's about $93.00 a day And that's only testing 1 Angle, 3 banners, 2 landers and 2 offers. I forgot to put in Lander 2 > Offer 2 so its even more than that.
We all know you've got to test a lot more than that.
So this is just my .02, I've seen follow alongs where ppl make starting off small work, but it takes a lot longer. I think I can fail faster and find something profitable faster by simply spending more faster.

Good Luck !

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I have tested it before but not enough to notice any major patterns as of yet, the results were kinda sporadic. Changing frequency cap will change where you are in the bidding order and change the amount of volume you get so it's one of those things that's hard to test so specifically.

It's easy to notice a difference between a cap of 1 and having no cap at all, but it's much harder to notice any big differences between caps of say, 2 and 3. I think it's best to leave it at a cap of 1-4 and consider it a variable not worth thinking about when other factors are more important to a campaign's success.

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I've read that article and it's good, especially when it talks about the mindset you have to have. But I both agree and disagree in the way spending XX or XXX or XXXX amount of money specifically is the key to success. In countries where the volume just isn't there to spend xxx and xxxx amounts of money you are forced to have a limited amount of spend because that is the only way to make it work in that given placement/country.

For me personally, I'd feel comfortable spending $1k a day on TJ after I feel I know everything there is to know about it and when I can say to myself, "Hey I can make this source work in smaller, less competitive, placements without too much trouble...what's stopping me from killing the bigger placements?" I haven't reached that point yet but hopefully soon.

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Yea I kno how you feel, I was there. Just saying, adult isn't POF, gotta go hard. Dont be afraid of competition, that just means there money there. Personally, I'd rather make $50 profit after spending $500 than $50. There's just so much more to work with.
Again Good Luck!

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You're right, and if you have the budget and the system to comfortably work in those placements, I think it's in your best interests to do it. I'm just stubborn and I started in smaller placements and I would hate to move to different ones without getting these to work first haha.

If I didn't see any potential, I think I would've moved to a place to spend more and get data more quickly, but I think it's possible to get smaller placements profitable as quickly as placements where you can spend more, you just gotta be more ruthless in your testing and cutting and not test too many things at once that lead you to over-analyzing (one of my personal problems) data and finding patterns where there are none.

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Results for yesterday (March 15th):

Placement 1:
Spent: $5.71
Revenue: $0
Total: $5.71

Placement 2:
Spent: $29.25
Revenue: $15
Total: $14.25

Placement 3:
Spent: $38.12
Revenue: $55
Total: $16.88

Takeaway for the day: I'm relieved that the same ads that were profitable the day before, stayed profitable the day after. I'll start changing my other placements up to resemble the profitable one and see if they have better results. I think I may have to change up the design a bit in order to get the best CTRs according to each placement, but the general theme of the ads will stay the same since that's where the conversion is coming from mainly. One of my placements had lower spend due to a couple of people having a bidding war and went to some crazy high prices, but I've seen it happen before and usually the prices come down after they get tired of it.

Things to think about: Setting ads up to rotate before my current ads start burning out I think is a good habit. It's better to be proactive then reactive so I'll run ads for as long as they stay profitable and then once I see them start dying out 1 or 2 days in a row, I'll swap in new ads and see how that affects things.

Other than that, my weekends are usually pretty busy so I'll write up a more detailed report about things this coming week.

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It was a productive and busy weekend I'd say. Had a lot of other stuff to attend to outside of marketing, but made time to adjust my campaigns and open up some new placements.

Data for yesterday (March 16th):

Spent: $105.50
Revenue: $180.50
Total: $75

Takeaway for the day: Hitting a consistent $100+ days would be great, and in order to do that I'll have to open up more placements and definitely create new ads to keep things fresh and swap in new ads if I see dips in performance. Today is Monday and things are still performing pretty well so I'm really happy about that. It can get a bit hectic with a bunch of different placements to look after but I'm kinda used to micro-managing after doing PoF for so long. The bidding war that was taking place in one placement stopped as predicted and the bids went back down. I think people realize that once they start a bidding war and their competition doesn't back down, it's best to set the bid lower again and watch the other(s) follow soon enough since nobody wants to overbid tremendously for first place in the bid order, especially when margins can be slim.

Things to think about: Thinking of starting up more split tests for landing pages, will make a few variations of the current one I'm running and also make 2 or 3 entirely different ones to swap in and rotate with some traffic to see how they fare.

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Great progress. Looks like you are going to reach your $100+ days soon. Keep it up!

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Data for March 17th:

Spend: $124.65
Revenue: $220
Total: $95.35

Data for March 18th:

Spend: $109.16
Revenue: $170
Total: $60.84

Takeaway for the days: Got around to opening some new placements today, they don't really have all that much volume though judging by the number of impressions listed on TJ. Testing the new landing pages also, haven't gotten enough data to come to a conclusion about them yet though.

Things to think about: I'd like to work with the Top Right positions as much as I work with the NTV positions but I think they need to be treated differently, both with creative style and with the setup of the campaign in terms of capping and all that, but I'll see, maybe just keeping things simple is the best way to go. I don't see many advertisers going for the Top Right spots in this country.

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Looks like you found something, nice work man! Looking forward to the next update

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Good progress mate! Keep going strong until you hit those $1k days.

If the campaign doesn't require a lot of baby-sitting maybe it's time for a new geo similar to what you running.

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