The Adult Road to Stacking Money (23)
Yo STM! Time for another follow-along. Stay tuned, this should be good.
The Plan
Traffic Source/Vertical: Adult Webtraffic: specifically, Exoclick for now. Not 100% sure about this one, but I gotta start somewhere and I really like the AdultAdsPro tracking software which sadly only functions with Exoclick for now. I'm primarily running the usual 300x250 NTV A creatives right now, I'm definitely interested in possible underused ad positions/sizes. If anyone wants to share tips/experience in that regard, then please do so! Unfortunately I don't have the budget to test all these different factors myself yet.
Region: The Netherlands. Obvious choice, Dutch is my native language and it's probably somewhat less competitive than other, bigger countries.
Offers: I've got a few good adult offers over at Adsimilis, I've been focussing on an older demographic so far but the best milf-specific offer was paused recently. Thinking of going broad instead of just horny 40+ dudes.
Budget: I currently have around $1K a month to blow on this structurally.
Setup
I'm running on a VPS from WiredTree with the AdultAdsPro tracking software. For creatives and landing pages I am using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Muse respectively. Oh, and I'm using a CDN, cloudflare.com.
Progress so far
Creatives
I've tested about 30-40 creatives so far and have encountered one big problem: not a single one of them performed well in terms of CTR. Here's a recent batch:
As you can see, the result was not completely horrible, and one creative was in the green, but that is mostly thanks to the well-converting LP/offer probably. The CTR is just consistently crappy. I've tried alot of different stuff, both ripped/editted and self-made creatives, but no luck so far. As far as I have seen most people aim for at least >0.15 or >0.2 in adult, this seems unattainable so far. My latest batch of creatives has an average of 0.04. Here are a few examples of creatives I've tried:
Landers
I am running two different landers, a rules/profiles lander and a questionnaire lander. The questionnaire lander has a 40% clickthrough and a 6,2% conversion while the rules/profiles lander is doing 60% clickthrough and 4,6% conversion. Seems decent.
Bidding on Exoclick
I'm running mostly premium NTV-A placements and outbidding the top CPM. Not entirely sure how to go about selecting sites and determining bid size exactly, the Exoclick bidding system is a bit.. untransparant. On some sites, I'm outbidding top CPM but not receiving impressions, anyone encountered this before?
Up next
My creative juices are slowly running out as far as banners go, so I'm considering quitting the "milf/older women" angle altogether and going for a less niche demographic. Not sure if this is definitely the problem though, I might rip some more banners from the spy tool to set a benchmark to test against. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
For now, I will pump out some more creatives and see if I can get a decent ctr.
On a closing note; when is it generally statistically safe to cut creatives? I was thinking of cutting if I get no clicks/1000 imps, <0,1CTR/5000 imps and if they still run negative ROI at 1 to 1,5x offer payout.
Good start! Looking forward to this follow along.
Alright, here's the stats for my latest batch of creatives:
As you can see, some conversions but the CTR is still horrible. Even the creative that was previously in the green has taken a huge nosedive. I decided to take a look at how the different sites were performing:
HUGE differences there. 0.015 CTR over 90K impressions? What the hell? Admittedly, the worst performers are footer ads, but I didn't expect it to be this big of a difference. Lesson learned, I will avoid footer ads (for now).
Not entirely sure what to make of this except to cut out those crappy websites. I thought all of these were supposed to be "premium sites" according to Exoclick so I expected a somewhat comparable performance overall.
I'm now considering two options; either running it RoN next time or just slowly keep adding premium websites and test that way. Not sure if my budget can handle RoN.
The MILF angle has been very heavily exposed (no pun intended) recently - a different niche may be fresher and easier to target.
Are you targeting the biggest placements on Exo? If so, it's probably better to go for smaller placements with less competition initially.
Have you spent some quality time with the Adult Spy Tool (above)? It's a great way to get insight into what's working right now, ad-wise.
Originally Posted by caurmen
I'm not targetting the biggest placements (such as xhamster); mainly placements that have between 10.000 and 100.000 impressions. And I regularly use the spy tool, though I keep encountering the same (uninspired) ads it seems. I guess the same old formula still works.
Fired up a new round of quality creatives for the MILF angle and currently working on a new campaign without the MILF angle.
Recent stats from my newest batch of creatives (past 16 hours give or take a few), seems promising:
However, I was surprised by the extraordinary low number of impressions, this is my bidding setup:
Can someone clarify why I'm hardly getting any impressions?
Hm - can you check by site where the impressions are coming from? If the top one or two sites are being choked for some reason, that might explain it.
Seems like the volume has somewhat returned - maybe weekend bids are just higher and ExoClick doesn't show the proper top bid? Not sure, I'll split test with a higher bidding campaign if it happens again.
The MILF campaign is currently in the green (a mere 50K impressions over the last two days though) with a few good CTR creatives, just tweaking it a bit more. I'm thinking of throwing in a few more decent premium sites to up the volume so I can gather more data and optimize the campaign faster. Will also be throwing up a new (non-milf) angle today.
I will post stats tomorrow.
Awesome follow so far! I came here from a little bit of adult work and thought about ditching it completely. But it never hurts to diversify and run campaigns for a little bit of everything. I still hope to focus on sports / gambling / gaming but this follow along re-sparked my interest in adding adult back to my portfolio.
Nice follow along mate!
Keep us updated when you have some more data.
The second non-milf campaign is now running.. 2 conversions within the first half hour, currently sitting at 750% ROI. Not sustainable I'm sure, but still pretty damn exciting! Will post some detailed stats tomorrow.
Haha 750% roi BALLLAH
Need a tonne more traffic bro, hopefully you can stay above 100% looking forward to more results
Alright, stats time!
As expected, my second non-milf campaign despite a promising start has dropped off quite a bit. Possibly due to a drop in both CTR and CVR outside of the porn peak hours. I'm thinking of implementing day-parting soon but it's probably a better idea to gather some more data for now.
The MILF campaign is still doing okay but definitely needs to see some consistent green days soon if I am to keep running it. Don't want to keep spending money on a possibly worn out angle.
(Top one is the non-milf angle, bottom one is milf)
These are the stats for the past few days (past day in case of the non-milfy). I was splittesting different offers of which only one was converting, so I just cut out the rest. Also choose the best converting lander and cut out the worst creatives, so I'm curious to see if this will put me anywhere near the profit zone.
Next up: I'll be creating a bunch more banners for these two campaigns and I also have a new angle I want to test so I will throw up another campaign tomorrow. Quick question though; is it wise to run these campaigns at the same time, on the same websites? Seems foolish to compete with myself.
Thanks for the input so far, any advice is always welcome.
Competing with yourself is likely if you are targeting those placements that are giving only 400,000 impressions. This isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as you don't try to outbid yourself... It will basically be you distributing the impressions amongst more campaigns, which will slow down the testing of each one.
If it's a completely different angle I would just run it - it may do a lot better on these placements and is therefore better to focus on.
Originally Posted by zeno
Here's some stats:
Both campaigns after the recent optimizations (choosing winning offer+lander and cutting out some non-performing creatives). I think I'm dropping the MILF campaign; I've tried a bunch of different offers/landers/creatives now and although it has had a few around break-even day, it just doesn't show much potential in terms of a nice +ROI. Maybe, maybe after alot more optimization I can squeeze some profit out of it, but I'm sure there is lower hanging fruit to pick.
Which brings me to the second, non-milf campaign. Looking pretty good after a round of optimization! I've added a few more sites to up the volume. I've just finished cutting out a few mediocre creatives and am now left with 2 winners (around +100% ROI overall). I'm thinking of bidding on xhamster to really get some volume to this one. Both the landing page and offer seem to be solid performers. Any advice on how to proceed with this? I don't want to start scaling too quickly but I also don't want my campaign ripped before I get the chance to.
Nice - the green in there is looking good!
First obvious thing - can you increase your spend on that placement alone? If so, that's definitely job #1 - see how much you can push that before your ROI drops.
Don't forget to keep split-testing either - test smaller variations of your LP to see if you can get even more ROI.
New week, new opportunities. Here's the weekend stats:
-I dropped the MILF campaign.
-This second campaign was looking good and was pretty consistently green for a few short days, but didn't quite live up to my expectations.
-CTR is 0,239%, seems pretty decent. The LP CTR is 37.4% and overall offer CVR is 1.9%. It's a 1 in 20 conversion rate for just the offer.
I did not expect to be 35% negative ROI by this point, and it seems the campaign would need a pretty big jump to get to a decently positive ROI. I'm not sure what the weakest link in this campaign is; the LP seems to perform decently so maybe it's simply the offer? Or am I just paying too much for my clicks?
2% click-to-conversion is not great. The issue is likely your angle or the offer, or a combination of the two.
I would find other offers to plug into the backend - from whatever network has them.
These are the stats from yesterday. Currently running only one campaign.
As you can see, big increase in volume. I decided to get my hands dirty and opened the RoN floodgate after making a few tweaks and putting up a few optimization algorithms in AdultAdsPro. Very happy with the results; finally some actionable data and also breakeven right off the bat. I'm throwing up some new creatives and two new landers asap. Also looking for a new offer to splittest with.
Overall, I'm delighted with the RoN traffic and the algorithm option in AAPro. This is the kind of volume I can quickly act upon instead of waiting for days to have some statistically significant data. Lets see if I can get this baby into the green zone.
Tasty tasty data!
Nothing like opening flood gates and breaking even - free data!
Yup free data nice dude haha!
Keep the traffic flowing, wait till the stats are statistical significant, you don't wanna pull the plug to early on your data. Looking forward to the next batch, hopefully very very green soon bro!
Campaign seemed to be heading in the right direction, and at one point yesterday (Saturday) it was doing a solid +100% ROI after cutting out less performing landers and creatives.. and then all of a sudden around 7-8PM it completely stopped converting. I was around €40 in profit and pretty stoked about it, but the campaign just dried up and dived back into the red eventually. Very frustrating because these mixed signals make it hard to decide where to focus my efforts.
Slight delay due to soon to be resolved cashflow issues; but I will have data rolling in ASAP. Stay tuned.
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