[ADULT] Rookie Follow Along with XXX advertising (52)

Hi Guys,

I want to learn the world of adult advertising, and this is what I want to focus in upcoming future. I joined the forum and read fair bit already, but I have to admit the amount of information in here is just massive... to acquire all the knowledge will take me ages. So since I already started my journey it'll be good idea to kick off my FA and learn along the way.

As I said, I've started the Adult campaign already - I kicked off with ExoClick - in one of the European markets (one of the bigger ones and more competitive). It all started around 20th of March and below you can see my progress:



As seen the ROI was positive yesterday, but with very little of overall profit, other than that I'm in red. As for my first campaign I'm thinking it's not the worst thing in the world.

What I've done so far is:
-> Using only one placement (near the video a)
-> Using ripped LPs - edited a little images but really nothing else.
-> Using mainly ripped banners. Just started creating my own ones, based on what works. I'm having some Banners that are working, which stays in the pool, and other ones are introduced every now and than just to test the CTR and how they perform.
-> Using 2 offers that converts
-> I'm not bidding the top space, with only 1 UV / day cap

Based on my testing to date - I have selected few "funnels" that are performing well enough - in example:
baner1 --> lp3 --> offer1
baner4 --> lp2 --> offer1
*by well enough I mean has the positive ROI --> I'm not looking at single CTR or so in there here I'm just selecting profitable funnels

And I'm trying to create the visitor redirect profiles in the CPVLab for that but unfortunately it's not working as I'd expected (have a ticket on that waiting to be resolved). I'm keen to see how this will impact my overall ROI.

What worries me a bit is the overall banner CTR it's dropped so much in last couple of days that it's not even funny:


In the upper bit although overall daily CTR was like 0.16% to 0.2% the good performers were closer to the 0.3% and other ones were around 0.1% or below. In the current days I have all the banners performing equally crappy with smaller difference between good ones and bed ones.

Now the question here is: Why ? -> Is it banner blindness, me being lower bidder or something else?

Other than that for upcoming days my plan is:
- understand and apply some more science to the banner/funnel selection (statistics)
- try new banners - own and ripped
- develop some copy to be translated on fiverr and applied to banners and in future to LP

Any tips for the rookie ?

Definitely, DEFINITELY try your own banners. Ripped banners are great for getting a baseline, but you're very unlikely to make serious, long-term profit from them. The same applies to landers. Figure out what the baseline you can get from ripping is, then beat it with your own stuff.

Lately on adult the name of the game is to rotate banners often, especially on self-serves.

So if you are using ripped banners you are already starting handicapped.

Start with fresh banners and rotate them every couple days.

Let us know how it goes.

Thanks Everybody for the tips.
Today I have done new banners on my own. And tried to blend them in with my premium xxx site. I've created like 10 of them for now just to test the waters. I will upload them tomorrow.
This is because I have put my bids just one cent below the max bid and want to see the impact of this to my current banner performance. I have made a quick screen-shot so we can compare the results (I hope that there will be some).

Tomorrow I'll update the new ones and will see how the things are going. For banners rotation - I believe that one I have the winner ... even I would have one I'd be rotating banners constantly... Hope this will maximize the life of the profitable campaign as well as give good options. ( I can tell this now but let's see what will happen in real life though).

As for AdultAdsPro - I see it looks very good but for now I'm going to stay with CPVLab and focus on putting as much money into campaigns.

To do:
--> still some angle ideas and then translate them
--> upload new banners
--> once one of the banners is good enough try to align LP to them

cheers

So Yesterday

Revenue: 30.45
Spend: 59
P/L: -28.55
ROI: -48%

Not too flash, but still ain't complaining. So again I didn't got any answers from the CPVLab with regards to the visitor redirect profiles so, I've set the things up kind-of manually. Basically if you want that some particular ad-click will go the the some particular LP you need to do it as below:

http://domain.com/base.php?c=666&key=666777666&keyword={src_hostname}&adtyp=BANER1&clpid=1

Originally Posted by majkelos

As for AdultAdsPro - I see it looks very good but for now I'm going to stay with CPVLab and focus on putting as much money into campaigns.

If an API-access platform for a specific traffic source is available FREE then definitely go for it, at least then in the future you will know if it is worth the expense for your purposes.

Facebook's Power Editor is a good example of this. And virtually everyone who can use it does.

Cheers guys.

If/When I will have some time on my plate I will test the different tracking, now I'm doing it with CPVLab and just learning the game of Adult Advertising.

So - ads are running for a while now, and all of them have more than 10,000 impressions - it's actually closet to the 20,000 impressions. They kind of around 2x offer payment threshold. with this being said I've played around in excel when reading this guide and came up with calculations determining Minimum Profitable CR. Results are below:



This analysis is just giving me the basics - about my overall ad performance, it's not going too deep into the whole AD -> Page -> Offer sequence, but I believe it's a good starting point to pinpoint the ones with healthy minimal conversion rate and go deeper to CPVLab and understand which variation gave the biggest ROI.

Anyways, as seen I have 2 winning banners (002,303) - unfortunately these are ripped ones . And also one N002 which is showing better stats than the whole rest.

Question: Should I now discard other banners?
Not sure - first off CTR is pretty crappy so maybe yes. But did I give each variation a fair shot? No - I have Baner X 3 LP X 2 Offers -> that's 6 possible combinations. If I'd wanted each combination to be visited by at least 100 people I'd need 600k impressions (with ctr 0.1%) which may cost me up to $170 (assuming $0.3 COM) per one banner tested. For 10x Banners I'd have the $1700 testing budget per day or so.

Not gonna happen So I believe I'd need to have some kind of hybrid between statistical approach and exposing each variation enough and my gut feeling. I think though that there should be minimum banner CTR that I need to aim for? for now it will be 0.15% with aspirations to 0.2% but I think everything in the range 0.25% is my longer term goal (that's where the money is).

That's for the banners - but in the end I'm looking at the +ROI of the whole sequence.

The decision point going forward will be:
-> Banners minimum impressions 15,000 to make any decision
-> If CTR is lower than 0,15% and not profitable - remove and add new banners to the mix
-> If profitable investigate what was profitable, and continue testing

Now Question 2: Should I have 2 separate campaigns in ExoClick for my winning banners and separate for my testing bunch?
I'm thinking maybe this should be the way to go? To milk the winners a bit more and test the rest in the different pool? I'd keep the same CPVLab campaign to have the data in one place. But what is your thinking here? Any tips?

So I've created another lot of banners yesterday, still need to test them along with the ones I've done 2 days ago. I kept the "copy" from the winning banners and just changed images, colors and fonts. Although the copy is same I tried 4 different angles in terms of images. Will test them in near future aka. today.

Ok - I don't have full stats so will post them tomorrow.

Cheers

I'd usually recommend optimising each stage of the funnel independently, at least initially. As you say, it's just too expensive to test all variables individually, and I'm not convinced that the interactions are as strong as all that provided you're sensible and stay on-message with your banners, LP and offers.

In other words, if your funnel doesn't go "Fuck MILFs tonight" -> pictures of barely legal schoolgirls -> Match.com you should be fine

Blast out a load of banners, give each of them enough volume to get a picture of their CTR on its own (around 5,000 impressions based on your current CTRs), cut crappy CTR according to statistical significance (I'd ditch everything that is statistically certain not to get to 0.15% CTR), and then blast in more banners. Make sure to test widely, test designs, pictures and copy, and you should see your CTR go up fast. Then start cutting on ROI from there. Meanwhile, split-test between LPs and offers independently, bringing each test to statistical significance (use the Bayesian calculator - http://www.peakconversion.com/2012/0...al-calculator/ ), and you should rapidly improve your CVRs at the back end of the funnel.

Does that make sense? Let me know if you need more info / examples!

Thank you for the tips Caurmen. I appreciate all the help

So below is the table with my overall progress for last couple of days:



What can I say - no perfect. I got couple of my banners tested, but with no great results. Some of them went as high as 0,2% CTR but went down today already. Each had roughly 15k impressions, and provided only one conversion. The banner that did this is now on 0% ROI but others are in red. I'm not sure if there is any sense to continue running them... any tips?

As you see I started one campaign on Traffic Junky. The ROI is still crappy, banner CTR seems a bit better but it's not translating into higher profits. Damn there are quite fair bit of variables in this game. I need to select one traffic source going forward, not sure which jet, but seem like TJ is kind of nicer, they pretty strict with their ads guidelines though, and don't allow too many animations...

Anyways - I got back my Translation from Fiverr - this is quite a lot of text there. I got probably like 70+ ad headlines and short ad copy. This is what I will focus on -> already started prepping some templates in Photoshop. Tomorrow will finish (maybe day after, as it's really a lot) and then I can start cracking up some banners. So I'll be testing as much banners as possible in upcoming days. Need to be very mindful in terms of statistics as I don't want to bleed my money on crappy banners for too long.

For time being - I will run only 2 banners on Exo (the semi profitable ones), and pause traffic on TJ for now, pending new banners. I had a look at stats of my LP and all of them are pretty equal, I will pick one going forward and add one more different to the mix for ongoing tests.

So closing my post here with the question -> Wich traffic would you recommend for a rookie? TJ or EXO ? If any of them what are the best sites to advertise (if this question is too much, it's ok not to answer )?

Cheers

Running the banners: as a multiple of the payout of your offer, how much has that 15k impressions cost you? For example, if your average offer payout was $5, and you were paying $1 CPM, you'd have spent 3x the offer payout.

I'd generally run banners to 2x offer payout then cut them on ROI based on statistical significance - on Web, at least. The multiple's higher on mobile.

Don't forget to try without banners too.

Originally Posted by godspeed

Don't forget to try without banners too.

I think he meant was, try without LP e.g direct linking.

Banner > Offer as suppose to Banner > LP > Offer

Direct linking usually gives you a good indication if your offers hot or not and depending on the data you accumulate you can optimize.

Direct linking does give you an idea, but in a competitive world like adult a landing page in most cases will put you over the profit line, I'm sure there has been cases when DL makes more, but in such a saturated market a landing page allows you to bend the campaign and tweak a lot more variables. Also helps with keeping up the quality for your offer - leads to higher payouts - leads to more ROI

Righty Guys.

I kind of tried to run the offer on Exo and it gives my the decent conversion rates. So I wouldn't go direct linking there.
Now I'm struggling a bit with banner CTR on EXO - my best one gets like 0.18% ... damn. The one that is ripped and closest to be profitable - around 0.2% at the moment. Damn.... hard. I run similar banners on TJ. And they showing much better clicks --> lowest is pretty much 0.10% and highest is around 0.45% which is good I mean much better average sits around 0.26-0.3%. (I read somewhere that the banner CTR on Exo dropped quite a lot recently ... ).

That's for the banner - I'm not getting the conversions as I'd like to ... I've spent around $50 within last 2 days and get back like $20 (just rough approximation). So still a lot of optimizing and testing. But I'd probably incline to test more on TJ than Exo actually. Not sure which site shall I pick though . Only annoying bit is that the 'new' reporting system on TJ i a bit buggy and my clicks are not being shown so as CTR so I need to go manual on them, which is pain in the neck.

Anyways - I've got my translation back as I said, I still need to put in one of the wording from one angle into Photoshop, but 4 of them I've tested already and some as I said are showing some promise (on TJ). So I'd need to continue testing. Today I'll upload more banners, and will think about the LP, I have 2 rotating from which one is showing better results, so will keep this one and test something other.

Cheers.

Originally Posted by majkelos

What do you mean?

Hi everybody,

How are things? I've been running the ads and below are the results from last couple of days:



As seen - still in red. Not sure how to interpret these results - this being my 1st campaign is it good, bad or ugly. I'll go with it anyways for now. I'm running on Exo and TJ at the moment but due to some cash flow issues I'd need to focus on only one platform... As seen exo is having better ROI at the moment, but there I have ripped banner which is giving me almost all revenue. On TJ on the other hand almost all is mine and shows some progress/potential. So most likely I'd be looking into TJ for a while.

I've tested 2 placements (sites) there and below are the results (cost is off):



If I put this in to A/B calculator it says, that the placement is better (still no 95% or even 90% probability of being best). But the important bit is that placement 1 most of its views got yesterday and yesterday it got actually 11 conversions (42$ cost and 41$ Revenue). So I'll let it run today as well and see how it looks.

Stats from yesterday in terms of my banners:



As seen - couple of good ones, with decent CTR, I've showed you first 10 or so ... out of total of 38 tested yesterday (but this was across 2 placements). So to wrap this up - I'll run this placement today and see how it goes, if I'll see similar results to these from yesterday - I'm going to cut the crappy banners ...

...See you soon

P.S. TJ and their buggy reporting is not helping me at all - all the CTR I need to calculate manually -> export data from CPVLab, Export Impressions from TJ and then compile them together - not impressed ...

Yesterday wasn't great day.
For one of my placements, the one that will continue going:

Cost: $59
Revenue: $31
ROI: -47%

I've looked at the data and got some calculations going. For my Landing pages are ones as below:


According to this calculation, I should be keeping the one in the middle - gives me the 95% confidence that conversion rate will be between 2.1 and 6.2% ... well I suppose I can give it a crack and keep number 2 for a while (worst case scenario number 1 and 2 - i case I want co collect more data).

As for offers (testing 2) results are as below:



Apparently we have a winner - there is 95% probability that the conversion rate will be between 4.7% and 13.2% ... the offer shows goof performance, but is it really the winner ? Damn not sure. Still I'm going to try running only this one.

Now let's see how are the banners doing:


In green promising ones, some even quite ok. But when I go and apply the calculations from one of the lessons from the forum none of them will give me 95% certainty of being profitable. Have a look at the one with 4 conversions (line 8):



It's saying that current CR is 0.0282% .... the minimum profitable CR is: 0.0114% (so in the money in current state), but the overall range for that one is from: 0.007% to 0.07% ...well ideally I'd like the minimal to be above the minimum of profitability ... I'm not there yet. And that's the case for all of profitable ones --> curent is in the range but possibly can drop to below the positive ROI.

On the other hand if I select this ad and go in CPVLab to show me the stats for Ad > Page I can pinpoint better performing landing pages (actually 2 of them), I could do this with offers but won;t at the moment to keep it simple - as the distribution is pretty even.

Staying on the banners - some of them have quite sweet CTR, but no conversions - these will be parked up - I'd try to do some work on landing pages, and re-select offers to unify the funnel with them...

So what should I do now ?
I think I will:
- pause some banners for time being (non profitable ones - I'll keep guys with 0.3% CTR)
- Pause at least one LP (today one, tomorrow final battle)
- Pause one offer - what you think ?


Yep that's it for now... I believe - productivity question: How do you keep track of everything, like to-do list, or taking notes ...this sort of thing?

cheers

Guys,

How is it going ? Yesterday (06/04/2014) went as below:

Revenue: $52
Cost: $46
ROI: 13%

So it's nice - showing some progress! I like it ... now what I need to do is to take it to the next level and try to scale the shit out of the campaign.
What I mean 13% ROI is not enough .... it needs to be much higher to accomplish anything so there is still plenty to do. When I get there I should be thinking on how to scale things up (I hope there will be some tips form yous)

You see I didn't pause the second best LP yesterday and today both went 50/50 - same conversions, same revenue - I suppose need to keep them running today as well. As for offers - SAME freaking thing! both got same number of conversion and both have similar conversion rate ... what to think about it ?? Nothing, I'd just keep them for another day and see.

Banners:
Attachment 2178

As seen, some showing some good results. I'm tempted to see how only green ones are doing. How this will impact my overall ROI? or should i give more chances to the remaining ones? Any thoughts?

Cheers

You seem to have multiple offers with different payouts - are they giving similar EPCs? You say conversion rate is similar but that means little if the offer payouts are $3.30 vs $4.65.

At the moment I don't think you have enough conversion data to make guided ROI-based culling decisions. Most of the ads could go either way. However, you may want to spend some time focusing on the beast with 7 conversions - perhaps move it into it's own campaign, split test it with some minor variations and so on. It has a high LP CTR and offer CVR, which is a golden combo.

Yeah,

I believe rule of thumb (as per caurmen) will be 2x offer payout to cut banners. So I might keep few others around to meet these 10-15 bucks and see how it goes.

As for my offers - the other one (with higher payout) just started picking up recently, last couple of days it was slower than the lower payout one - with worse conversion rate, so that is the reason I want to give it some more time to prove it's not just some sort of bias but real performance... so yes still not enough data, but the more banners, LPs, offers I test, the more budget I need to test, so some of them need to go - based half on curent performance and half on gut feeling.

As you say - I'll try to play around with the best banner tomorrow, I got quite a few ideas to test ... so will see how it goes.

cheers

Small update on how I did yesterday:

Cost: $50
Revenue: $31
ROI: -38%

Back in red ...

Not sure what went wrong. I suppose I'll give it another day and see how it go.
Will update a bit more day after tomorrow - see you soon

What's going on guys?

Last 2 days weren't perfect for me - conversions slowed down big time:

08/04/2014
Cost: $42
Rev: $11
ROI: -73%

09/04/2014
Cost: $30
Rev: $25
ROI: -16%

not to shabby ... some of my ads dropped significantly, especially the one with big no of conversions ... what could have happen ?



Not sure what to do ... probably ad some more ads to the mix or something like that ... what you reckon? I'll work now on some LP as well - in terms of aligning the LP to my banners and have a look how this will contribute to the overall conversions.

I'm having some cash-flow issues and my CC doesn't look too fancy ... probably I'll need to pause my camps for a week or 2 to straight things up. But not 100% sure about this ... will let you know what I'll decide. I'm not going to stop ... just wait for some money to come in

Cheers

Banner and LP CTR aren't looking bad, I think the offer CVR is really letting you down. $0.05 EPC out the backend of a lander isn't great... so could be the offer itself or your lander/angle.

Definitely work on a consistent flow from banner to LP to offer.

Cashflow wise definitely prioritise your financial security over testing the campaign. The traffic isn't going to disappear.

Thanks Dave,
I know the CTR are looking not to bad ... on both sides...
...the flow on the other hand could be better, so by the time I'm waiting for some cash to come in I'll be working on some copy to unify my funnels.
I'd probably try to select some other more suitable offers (but I'm not going to be too risky with this)
My payment should be in within couple of days so this shouldn't be too long wait.

Will keep you guys posted - cheers

Just a little update from me.

I'm still waiting for my payments form Aff Networks, and on top of that I need to sort out my CC - taking all this into account I may start sending traffic somewhere towards end of next week sometime around 18th April, or if thing will be more complicated - maybe even sometime around 25th.

But I'm not sitting on my ass doing nothing - I've written up 2 new LP copy for my top performing angles - these were translated today, and in next days I'll be transferring this copy to the Landing Pages itself. That being said I have LP main body copy which will be roughly the same, then I have 5-10 Headlines and couple of images as well. What you guys reckon should I be rotating these things randomly within one LP and pass some variables to CPVLab to get the data sorted ?? Any ideas and tips here? Is there any hierarchy of testing of the LP? Headline 1st, than Image then CTA or other way around ?

I'll be working on some new banners as well, but since I don't have too much of a banner problems currently. I'll focus on finding new offers that suit my angles, so there will be at least 2 offers per angle.

What I'll plan to do is to have separate campaigns for each of my angles:

Angle 1:
Banners --> LP Variations (images or headline first) --> Rotate through 2 Offers

and same for angle 2 ....

Any thoughts?

I would focus on the headline and image first. Is the image a large element of your lander? Perhaps rotate 6 landers - 3 different images and 2 different headlines. You could rotate these dynamically using something like Landing Page Genius (or some other custom PHP) but it will be easier to just copy/paste the lander, edit the CSS/text and then add it as a complete new lander to rotate through in CPV Lab.

Definitely rotate offers on the backend as well. Usually the stronger offer will do better across the board, so you don't necessarily need to collect heaps of data for every single lander/offer combo.

You using Exit Popups?
You need to improve your flow. Your banner are irrelevent to your offer and landing page.

Hi Guys,

Thanks for the inputs!

As I said - I'm working on unifying the funnel - so as Banners --> Landers --> Offers are speaking the same language, I'm working on the landing pages now, let's see what will happen. I will focus on rotating images and headlines in the beginning.

My offers are not bad for one of the angles but pretty out of the discussion for the other - so this will need to be justified as well going forward.

I don't have exit pops - what you reckon should I put some in as well?

Now - some random thoughts of mine:
- Mobile traffic on TJ - should I go for it and test as well ?
- Other Placements - should I try other placements at this stage, or wait and test the one I have first ....

Cheers

Hi fellas,

How are you doing today?

Some small update from my side - I'll start with banners
*see atachment



As seen there are still few ones that are going quite OK. The top 6 of them.
I'm going to keep them running for a time being, and see how this will go.

I'll start analyzing these banners and try to make some similar ones based on the performance....
This have possibly no value whatsoever, but below is a small table showing my all banners vs only winners above:



Happy days...

...moving on below you can have a look at my LP statistics (data is coming from abtester.com):


No obvious winner so far, but they all perform not too bad.

So what will I do further:

* Continue test with the winning banners
* Create more alike banners
* Have a look at the landing pages - maybe add something new, test more Headlines, Images
* Not sure what to do with offers, will keep them for now

...and wait for the first couple of seriously profitable days

Any ideas what else?

Have you culled off all the negative ROI banners yet?

I would just run the top 3-4 and scale from there. If you test new banners do them with lower budgets while you let your money makers soar.

Originally Posted by zeno

Have you culled off all the negative ROI banners yet?

I would just run the top 3-4 and scale from there. If you test new banners do them with lower budgets while you let your money makers soar.

So last days I'm coming back into the miserable business!

- I'm running only winning banners, but still ROI is worse
- I'm running best LP and still CR is worse
- I'm running besf offers but CR is worts

So not really sure what I'm doing wrong ?

Total stats till date are:
Cost: 640$
Rev: 480$
ROI: -25%


So not sure what to think about it ... Have a look at the day-parting data



Question here is simple - is it usual for you guys too, that you have offer performing much better afternoon. I'd imagine that the night hours would smash it much better, but no... barely any conversions from 12AM to 11AM, it's almost to the point of being suspicious.

Have a look at my banner stats (data from Wednesday)


And my LP statistics:


And offers:


Bottom line is last week I was still able to get some conversions during the night time (12AM to 11AM) not it's much more random, not sure why? This is the time that I still have visitors to my Offers, but they are not converting. Overall ROI is dropping....

Are the banner CTRs dropping also?

As for your day-parting data, that looks fine. I certainly wouldn't consider it suspicious. Remember it shows visits and conversions, not conversion rate.

The spike at 2-3 AM could be delayed conversions from the 12-1 AM visitors. Your 6-11 AM data shows a similarly low CVR.

12-2 AM might be where people opt-in, sign up or whatever but then go to bed before checking their email to complete. Or it could just be the apparent behaviour of the demographic. The data is the data.

As for your other data... upload the pics to imgur. They are too difficult to look at right now.

Originally Posted by zeno

Are the banner CTRs dropping also?

As for your day-parting data, that looks fine. I certainly wouldn't consider it suspicious. Remember it shows visits and conversions, not conversion rate.

The spike at 2-3 AM could be delayed conversions from the 12-1 AM visitors. Your 6-11 AM data shows a similarly low CVR.

12-2 AM might be where people opt-in, sign up or whatever but then go to bed before checking their email to complete. Or it could just be the apparent behaviour of the demographic. The data is the data.

As for your other data... upload the pics to imgur. They are too difficult to look at right now.

Yes it's the forum doing the image shrinking.

What's currently in your offer rotation now?

It looks like it is really the final offer CVR that is letting you down.

30/800 i.e. ~2% conversion rate from banner to offer is pretty poor. Is there anything you can take away from banners 4 and 6 in the first image? What's different about them? They are giving much higher conversion rates.

Do they give a better banner > lander > offer flow? Do they resemble the offer colour scheme?

Originally Posted by zeno

Yes it's the forum doing the image shrinking.

What's currently in your offer rotation now?

It looks like it is really the final offer CVR that is letting you down.

30/800 i.e. ~2% conversion rate from banner to offer is pretty poor. Is there anything you can take away from banners 4 and 6 in the first image? What's different about them? They are giving much higher conversion rates.

Do they give a better banner > lander > offer flow? Do they resemble the offer colour scheme?

People's mindsets and actions vary with the time of day, local events and a myriad of other factors.

A smart approach would be to day part this campaign and optimise to profit. Focus your funds on making money there.

Then, start another campaign that runs in the off hours. Experiment with that and see if some wild ideas get any traction. It could be that you need a different angle during the late nights or early mornings.

Small update from my side

So I've been running few tests and try to optimize the campaign.

Unfortunately, when I cut non-profitable banners and low performing LP I couldn't make it into green so fuck knows what is the matter with me. I actually dropped off from 0%ROI to -50%ROI after I did this...

...fight continues...

On other side - my small 2 person master mind group split apart. Why? We had different approaches to testing and this was the main cause for that. It's a major pity for me cos I felt as this was helping us in a way at least. Anyways - if there are any people interested in MM group, that
-> Are OK with not talking over Skype every day
-> I would prefer just plain chats or e-mail exchanges
-> Are happy to test fair a bit
-> would like to share the findings / LP / Banners / Offers

hit me up we can work something out together.

Last thing is that since my monthly budget is running a bit low - I'd be pausing my tests for 2 weeks pending payment from my network (OK I still have 2 days worth of testing but it's almost nothing), so I will be back into serious action from around mid month June ...

Cheers

Ok guys just a small heads up from my side.

Another month has come, and I got some pending payments which is lovely .
Now I can do some more testing.

I abandoned my previous geo (Germany) it was too competitive for my limited budget I think. I will be back there when I'll have more experience and some campaigns actually profitable.
I've selected another market - medium sized European geo.

I'm going to continue on TJ for now. During the time I wasn't running anything I was preparing all the things up. So I have:
-> Banners made for 315x300 and 300x25 placements
-> Banners are made by me, with my colors and images
-> LP are ripped, but I've changed them a bit - images / headlines
-> Angles - using some of the existing ones for a baseline, and some of my own ones...
-> I will start with 3 placements bidding within TOP3 position. 2/3 angles per placement (depending on volume) and 15-25 banners respectively

Testing - I will follow maynzie small guide for simple campaign so:
-> initially I will select best offer
-> then I will select best LP
-> and then I will worry about banners.

I'm pumped, and hope I'll get some good results

Cheers

Looking forward to seeing your results!

Hi Guys,

So since the start of campaign I have to say i don't have a lot of traffic. It's been around 2 days now and have a look at the placements:

*I'm pretty much bidding at 1st spot all the times

As you can see not too flash . But I don't have too much data on the other hand.

My initial approach is to select a offer first. My LP CTR is pretty low at around 20% or below! So In the mean time I decided to go ahead and see how Direct Linking will look like. Only for a sake of testing and selecting offers.

Each Placements has at least 2 angles in banners, but I'd rather worry about that when I have Offer and decent Landing page.
For now I will wait and see how it goes. And make a call tomorrow whether I should continue with DL or test some other LP and try to increase CTR.

Placement 2 looks pretty promising!

Yeah caurmen, still far away from where I want it to be though .

The Volume is rather slow on this geo. Maybe it's better for now - I will slowly bite into this.
I was testing 3 offers after 2.5 days only 2 showed any conversions, so I paused the third one and will give these 2 another day to decide which one will be the keeper.
When I'll select one offer I will split test it across 2 networks and will focus on LP.

The thing that makes me thinking is - I probably need to be a bit smarter with testing LP. Initially I got 4 of them, which is way too much as for the amount of traffic I have on these placements. I will select 2 and go ahead with the test like that. I have an idea of a bit different layout so will be working on that in the mean time.

When I will select the winning LP i will go ahead and test banners and angles on the banners. Only thing is that on the placement 2 4 out of 5 conversions are coming form one angle, I will see how it will go moving ahead. I still have couple of angles to test (came up with 20 or so by myself so have plenty of testing to do).

Will give you update with numbers when I have some.

Hi Guys,

How's it going. So yesterday I've selected one offer for further testing. This was the offer that during testing period had more conversions. It's not really statistically significant, but to gather statistically data I would need to wait another week I believe. It was decision made based on more conversions and it was backed up by slightly higher EPC from network.

After that I've selected 2 Landing Pages for further testing. For now, there is one that performs slightly better but I will give it another couple of days to get more data.



Stats for yesterday doesn't look too bad. But I don't want to be too excited about that. All time stats still not too good. But it's comforting that placement 1 managed up to lift up the game and showed more conversions yesterday.

There is definitely big space for improvement in terms of banner CTR, which will bring my CPC down and eventually list margins. But as I said I want to focus more on the backend of my funnel for now, and find the best performing LP. After that I will be selecting good banners.

Any thoughts ?

I would pick the best lander for placement 2, i.e. look at your data and see which lander traffic from placement 2 specifically works better on.

Split it into it's own campaign and run variations of the best banners on placement 2 + the best lander only. See how much you can pump up ad CTR.

Since you don't have much traffic I would focus on testing some ad-level variation first to get more click data coming through. If that works, you can then throw in some lander variations now that you have more clicks to work with!

Zeno, that's pretty much what i want to do.

I want to take best LP and then start running banners. Problem is that I don;t have "the best" as of yet. I hope tomorrow will bring me some answers

cheers

Hey Guys,

Small Update from my side:

I've been collecting data for some time now. And The picture is looking still a bit messy. But I have direction where I'm going so that's good. I'll wait another day and start cutting banners. I want to make new banners and upload them based on the winners as well as to test new angles.

As I mentioned before I've selected offers based on small sample size, as well as network EPC. I had Offer A from Network A and Offer B and Offer C from Network B. Let's say i selected Offer C from Network B (damn) to go forward. As Offer A didn't have any conversions. .....
...Yesterday I decided to try same offer A from Network B on one of my placements, and it's doing pretty well so I will continue with that for a time being. It's just a comment that everyone is repeating. Test same offers but on multiple networks!

Anyways I was running 4 placements before - I paused 2 low volume ones for time being - pending me having some good funnels to expand.

Coming back to money:

Placement 1 - All time:
Cost: 200.37
Rev: 73.85
ROI: -63%

Placement 1 - 13/06/2014
Cost: 30.85
Rev: 0
Roi: -100%

Placement 1 - 14/06/2014
Cost:32.01
Rev: 7.2
Roi: -78%

Placement 1 - 15/06/2014
Cost:26.96
Rev: 30.4
Roi: 13%


As seen this placement has its ups and downs. It's the one that had quite good CVR when I re-launched 'Offer A' from another network. Well I suppose I will now focus on the banners and try to find winning set of banners (preferably more than the one set). It has much more active banners at the moment. Like 25 or so (I may be guessing a bit) so I want to bring it down to 15 or so.

Placement 2 - All Time
Cost:126.6
Rev:108.5
ROI: -14%

Placement 2 - 13/06/2014
Cost:16.91
Rev: 14.4
ROI: -15%

Placement 2 - 14/06/2014
Cost:16.51
Rev: 21.6
ROI: 31%

Placement 2 - 15/06/2014
Cost: 14.72
Rev: 21.6
ROI: 47%

This one went much better since the beginning. I'm going to focus on banners tomorrow as well. And try to select a winning ones. Based on them I will do the new ones. and try to chuck in some new angles.

Any comments

Scale those placements a bit to get some more data - provided your budget allows this. If you can spend $50 a day on placement 2 without ROI suffering then you will have a lot more data to work with.

Originally Posted by zeno

Scale those placements a bit to get some more data - provided your budget allows this. If you can spend $50 a day on placement 2 without ROI suffering then you will have a lot more data to work with.

Hi guy,

I'm still running the campaign. I'm experimenting with banners to find the wining combo. I'm not 100% consistent (not as much as I'd like to be) and some times I put on some other LP to test out or other offers... but in general I'm keeping my original funnel most of the time.

All Placements :
16-06-2014:
Cost: 49.8
Rev: 29
ROI: -42%

17-06-2014:
Cost: 52.1
Rev: 42
ROI: -19%

18-06-2014:
Cost: 54.4
Rev: 84
ROI: 54%

19-06-2014:
Cost: 51.8
Rev: 27
ROI: -47%

20-06-2014:
Cost: 32.1
Rev: 22
ROI: -31%


Placement 1:
16-06-2014:
Cost: 31.9
Rev: 11.6
ROI: -64%

17-06-2014:
Cost: 27.5
Rev: 30.4
ROI: 11%

18-06-2014:
Cost: 28.6
Rev: 60.8
ROI: 113%

19-06-2014:
Cost: 27.1
Rev: 23.7
ROI: -13%

20-06-2014:
Cost: 16.8
Rev: 14
ROI: -15%

Placement 2:
16-06-2014:
Cost: 17.9
Rev: 17
ROI: -3%

17-06-2014:
Cost: 24.6
Rev: 11.6
ROI: -53%

18-06-2014:
Cost: 25.9
Rev: 23.2
ROI: -10%

19-06-2014:
Cost: 24.7
Rev: 4
ROI: -85%

20-06-2014:
Cost: 15.3
Rev: 8
ROI: -49%

So as you can see Placement 1 has some good well in green days. Placement 2 is not that great, but it had more days close to 0% ROI. I was running in between 15-20 ads per placement, to find some good banners, and test angles. Today I selected 9 banners per each placement (the best ROI ones) and now I let it run for few days and see how it goes.

The amount of volume in not that great - so I need to figure out how to keep on testing new banners more efficiently. Any suggestions?