My secret private little noob follow along (30)
Hi guys.
I have joined a few days back and I tried absorbing as much content as possible while waiting to be approved on various networks such
neverblue
f5media
convert2media
a4d
myadsimilis
I just got a note from my AM that my account has been approved at f5media. Nice.
My goal is to get my first conversion as soon as possible as I have seen how motivating this was to many other pips running their follow alongs. So yes my ambitions are rather humble.
I am running on a low budget and I am interested in making a difference in ad creatives and unusual angles as soon as first testing is behind me.
All of your help would be really helpful as I am struggling with many basic things. I have just not been able internalize all the info yet. However, I am not a complete noob. Installing the proper202 was at least a piece of cake for me. ))
I will be targeting European markets in particular Germany as this is where I see my linguistic competitive advantage.
I am looking at dating, adult dating right now
My account manager has proposed a few programs right of the bat. Most of them are indeed adult dating. 2 are DOI (Double Optin Requirement as I found out) and 1 SOI...
I think I should run with the SOI as its more likely to convert. The payout is just above 2 bucks.
Initially I want to kick it of with POF Germany as a traffic source but I am unsure about the Adult Dating vertical to be allowed there.
Here are my questions to you guys.
1. What traffic source would you recommend? (German adult dating?)
2. Is it reasonable to pick SOI over DOI?
Anything else in the process would be a great help too but I will be also going through all the guides once again to make sure I have got some process down before I start.
Lets see if I can become good at this. (Stock market and Poker was not for me, but here I have some control over the outcome)
OK. There are actually a few good guides to take me to the next step.
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...World-of-Adult
So I am good to go on my own to the next level.
>> Exoclick
Good start mate.
I would start with C-date or DateforMore in DE .
Keep us updated.
Hey guys I am completely stuck with the tracking. The longer I check the guides the more lost I feel. Could you give me a few hints. Here is my situation.
I have 5 banners for the initial setup 300x250
I have Prosper for Tracking installed and working
I am on F5media using Cake for offers
ExoClick is the traffic source
I think the missing part of the puzzle is that I am not sure what the final outcome should be here
1. I have an affiliate link from f5media that I could directly use to send traffic to but I would not be able to measure which banners convert best.
2. For that I need the prosper tracking software
But how does this all play together.
Should I have 5 different links (from my prosper domain) with 5 different banners on ExoClick?
So all traffic will be sent to my prosper domain, it will record the traffic origins and forward all the traffic to 1 single landing page that then does what? Send a ping back to prosper reporting if a conversion occurred?
If that is true:
How does the link look like on exoclick
http://f5mtrack.com/?a=xxxxxx&c=xxxxxx&s1=
or more like
http://mydomain.com/tracking202/redi...id=111&t222kw=
or rather
http://f5mtrack.com/?a=xxxxx&c=xxxxxx&s1=keyword&s2=[[subid]]
I am not sure what I am not getting here, but I ll continue the battle tomorrow... I am so close to start but still so far away. Maybe someone understands what I dont understand... )))
Lesson learned. - If you are new to tracking you need 2 days to get it to work. Don't try it if you are tired. Try figuring it out. Fail, be confused and next morning you can make it work once all the confusion settles down. To be sure its working and how to use it for more than one banner is something that can only be done with a running campaign, imo.
The beginning is quite slow.
Exoclick, my traffic source, has put my account from Verified to Non Verified after I transferred the first funds and submitted a campaign. They promise an account verification in 72 hours.
Gives me some time to think about a bunch of angles and a few banner ideas. However, without some skin in the game its not very exciting. I would much rather have my 5 angles run already to reach my 1 conversion goal. 
I know most people crave to see numbers and ROI. Cannot offer that just now. So I am going to reveal some of my thoughts while waiting for the traffic source to give me the green light.
Ad creatives:
1. I will be using a mix of stock photo images related to dating, and turn them adult with nasty local slang language, possibly some porn elements in thought bubbles and so on.
2. Also basic hand drawn illustrations seem to be doing ok so I am going to use some of those too
3. Amateur pictures with local slang and a bit of story telling - mostly boys thinking a la .... talk nice to them, and then bang them.... kind of thought process
I ll have a few angles per style rather than a few styles per angle. Should do the job of hitting a good starting point in what works and what does not.
My offer will be run RON (on the whole exoclick network rather than a specific site)
I have limited the categories to teen, milf and amateur as I think that suits the demo of sex dating best, I excluded all other topics to be targeted. These are a lot of assumptions, but there seems to be enough volume from the stats numbers given my the network, that is what I would check out if I d been in for sex dating locally.
The offer is SOI and the payout 2.4 USD. Low enough for testing it on a low budget, large enough to reach some sort of reasonable ROI (This is what I got from reading the threads here)
The theory is that horny young Germans will be looking to get hot on some teen, milf and amateur action stumble upon my banners and for second accept the idea/illusion that they will be able to sign up for that offer and start meeting horny normal local girls in secret to do the nasty stuff to them, they have just been looking at.
No double optin there - so no major interruption of the action. ))
Sounds all good in theory. Hoping to prove the concept soon. Any thoughts?
All sounds very sensible - you may find that you need to use harder-core images or animations to capture peoples' attention, but the stock idea is worth trying.
Make sure to try some more amateur-looking pics too - either actual amateur pics or ones that you've modified using our tutorial (in the POF section).
@caurmen
Yeah this is the type of level I am using.
I have been finally verified but my banners are being rejected by exoclick. "Banners are not uploaded correctly"
Not sure where the issue is, trying to figure it out via support. Maybe its a mix of animated gifs with jpgs or maybe one banner was somehow not complying. Hoping to get this sorted soon
If anyone had any experience with that I would really appreciate any leads on how to get this fixed but it could be a million things I guess.
It turned out that my animated gif banner would not show up on the network. As all banners were in one campaign it got rejected because of that gif ani graphic. Created separate campaigns for each banner to figure it out. All other banners are live now. One step closer.
OK Guys
The first campaigns were a horror show. Even after pausing all of the campaigns at 50 bucks they sucked up all the funds in the account even in the paused status all the down to -4.
Is this normal that pausing does not take effect immediately?
I ll post some of the numbers later, but tracking partly failed too so I have to see if anything is really useful. Gr
-75 usd in account and it keeps on coming... this is insane
If you've targeted a very large demo or placement it's likely that the traffic source will take a little while to pause, I'm afraid.
Definitely better to start off targeting smaller placements!
Yep - people make this mistake fairly regularly though I do believe Exoclick provides some warnings related to this?
A rather rough experience nevertheless the overruns are very substantial and the account balance can go below 0. Two major surprises. After pausing at 50 USD level and then go down another 250 uncontrollably under 0 to a total -106 USD. Hm. Is a violent and powerful experience as the traffic is there, you can get 100000 impression in a few minutes and you cant stop them.
Hello people
So I have a few days of AM with adult offers behind me. It is a horror show.
My learnings after spending USD 500 on uncontrollable Exoclick traffic and submitting countless support tickets in order for the animated gif uploading issue resolved:
The -You ve got a Message banner- have a great CTR especially in the day time. 0.40-.70... some shady traffic sources even go multiples of that.
THE Problem it is not converting using standard LP not modified standard LPs
So conversion after a few hundred thousand impressions and several hundred clicks is 1. buh.
Normal animated banners have a much lower CTR in the range of 0.10. Conversion 0
Direct linking to the standard German dating offers has produced 9 conversions after 1250 clicks and several hundreds of ad budget
Having studied xhamster carefully, absolutely all 98% of ads are going for the same 2 offers with the same LP. As this is the prime exoclick adult monster its representitive
CONCLUSION:
I am practically through my budget after a few tests. If you are new to this:
Forget Adult Dating in Germany
Forget You ve got a message banners
Forget Rules LPs
At this moment this seems to me like a nice moneymaking machine in itself, as I bet most ads on xHamster are actually newbees splittesting the same fucking LPs - Or buying data how you like to call it here. They are thinking they poor idiots looking to date are wasting their cash, but in reality its them. ))
In any case, I am not giving up just yet but adult is a sucker that does not work. Event with the most amazing banners at low cpms and super new Rules Landers, it is super difficult not to say impossible to make jerking people to sign up for one of those services anymore. Someone is making money here but rather sure not me and probably not a whole lot of AMers.
I know some of you are on it too even without participating actively in the forum. I wonder what your experiences are.
Any comments are welcome.
Short to hear you're having such a rough time :-(
Adult can definitely work, but the majors geos, placements and traffic sources are brutally competitive.
If you're running on xhamster in Germany, you're competing against the biggest affiliates in adult. They've got teams, years of experience, much higher payouts, direct relationships with the advertisers and so on.
If you're starting out in adult, a much more surefire way to proceed is to look for smaller pockets of profit. Third tier countries, lesser known traffic sources, or preferably both. Find a place where the really big guys won't get enough return from competing with you, get to profit there, and then build up.
I made germany work on Traffic Junky , But in smaller placements. You can make it work,but don't go on Video A spots when your budget it's low. You can't compete with the big guys spending 100 $ per day.
Caurmen, thank you for the encouraging words. I guess I am or was looking for a some sort of a unicorn situation. As once a post in forum said, its not a good thing to succeed on your first campaign. Well that was my second one, and it is quite disappointing that it did not even smell like an opportunity in the end.
Traffic cost 500
Converted 26
ROI -95%
At this point I am asking myself the question as I still have some cash left on exoclick (USD 200) how to most wisely use it? I find the traffic boost very nice but the fact that it can easily go over budget by 100% and more makes it an uneven game where I have to pause the campaign after 5 minutes just to take into account that it will still run for an 1h or more. So I am looking for something new to look into without being guilty of breaking the rule of jumping around and not making one thing work first.
What except Dating Offers can be advertised on Adult Traffic? Those are extremely boring and actually do not believe in the product at all (is that a naive remark?)
There are also different traffic sources on Exoclick. Do you have any experiecne with those? Entertainment and so on. What would be a few viable ideas to look into on Exoclick besides the adult dating stuff?
Hey, I've been where you are. I understand your frustration.
First, don't think you can run on Exoclick's most popular/competitive zone (ad spot), in a competitive country, using the same rules LP everyone else is using, and profit from that. It's not that easy unless you have some edge everyone else doesn't have. You are not profiting because you're competing with people who DO have that edge, in one way or another. Its not simply a bunch of "newbees splittesting the same fucking LPs".
You say that "adult is a sucker that does not work". But when you've tested only one angle that you didn't even come up with, on 1 geo...
I spent over about $2500 trying to make 1 offer work before I finally made it happen. You need to trust that you can do it.
Here is what made me my first profitable campaign in adult on exoclick
1) I created an angle that I had NEVER seen before.
2) I created a landing page that required my own database to function (dynamic content), so even if someone ripped it, it would not work. <-- MOST IMPORTANT PART MANY OVERLOOK
3) I used RON to determine best ad spot. (HINT: a spot that IS NOT EVEN LISTED IN THEIR PREMIUM ZONES, BUT HAS MASSIVE VOLUME).
If you want to make money in adult, you need to realize that most people are doing the same thing. If you can stand out, and outsmart the herd, you will surpass them. Don't give up after simply failing to make money from a campaign that everyone is running.
Mind map a bit, and stop throwing money around without a precise reason of WHY your campaign should even make money.
@zd__rd and @blackemil
I really appreciate your comments. Thank you.
I have tried 2 or 3 angles with a ripped lander and with a personally developed angle. I must admit I focused and spent too much trying to convert the Message For You Banner style. My point was to see if I can generate nearly enough conversions to start optimizing. That banner was driving good traffic. At - 50 % ROI I would at least have believed that offers like c-date or lustagenten actually convert at some point.
However the results were extremely disappointing.
Please correct me but if people click through to the landing page and then to the offer but bounce and convert only once, something is not exactly in demand. The direct linking version still worked on the SOI offer and got 9 conversions out of 1250 clicks however. That for me is a clear signal that either the offer or the traffic is complete rubbish.
I may still have not fully tuned in into the AM thinking so I d appreciate if you could give me any hint into how to think about it. I dont see a point in running the offer right now. But both were recommended to me and others run them too. It just does not fit together.
@zd__rd
You menioned that you had to spend 2.5k to make one work. How have you been doing since? Does a working campaign that is not a unicorn eventually recoup the data purchase? How much easier is it to optimize new campaigns? Or is the second one 90% the learning curve again?
Is there a holy grail realization somewhere that is difficult to put into words or is it really purely fixing certain elements and optimize for others until a formula stands?
sociallyfamous - there is no real "holy grail" to affiliate marketing. It really is just testing different elements and optimizing until it works.
The thing is, sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes an offer sucks. Sometimes traffic sucks. Sometimes you just can't figure out the right angle. Sometimes your ads or landing page just don't work. Shit just happens.
Honestly, if you've spent $500 and have a -95% ROI that means you're getting $2.70 per conversion and have made $25. Frankly, I'd just stop the campaign. Consider it a sunk cost. It happens. You have to learn when to cut your losses. You say you have $200 left. You're almost certainly not going to make this campaign profitable with $200. You haven't come close with your first $500, so odds are it's not just going to magically start working.
Caurmen has given you the best advice so far. Start a campaign in a much lesser known country. Find offers in Poland, Croatia, Singapore, Jordan, Chile. Stay away from the English speaking world and Western Europe. Crawl before you start sprinting. You'll get there eventually, but I think you bit off a bit more than you could chew to start off with.
@hannahmcintyre
You are right, I tried to do more than I was prepared for.
I was under in the impression that an offer will convert to some degree as long as all proven elements are there.
Some speak about a major competitive advantage. The advantage must be pretty major under the conditions I experienced such as almost free traffic or people looking for adult dating sites or a banner that presells so good....
But apparently the competitive advantage is in the combo where 1 plus 1 = 4 rather than 2.
@sociallyfamous
Since it became profitable, It ran for a week or two making good profits daily, but the margins were still just so small, so I ran into a cash flow issue even with early payments from my aff network. So I eventually stopped running in that vertical all together. I knew about 1 week in after starting in adult that I hated it, (i'm not particularly a fan of perusing twisted porn themes, and I like to work in public places, so its sometimes hard to find a corner to sit in at the coffee shop while making bouncing boob gifs...), but I stuck with it for months because I was not about to fail at something that I already started.
As for the "holy grail realization", there have been many of those realizations for me personally. After a while, you fill start to internalize it all in a way that you understand and everything becomes a lot more straightforward, clear, and less stressful. In the beginning everything is a cluster-fuck mess. My most profitable realization in affiliate marketing was simply: Don't work as hard, keep it simple. I make the most money on campaigns where the majority of my time is spent thinking, before I even begin. Many times you can rule out what won't work using your intuition, rather than spending money to test things that you can figure out for free. Before you try another campagin, think about what it is that you are selling/promoting, answer this question: Why is this offer/angle/lp combination going to COMPEL the user to buy/signup. Pretend you are your audience, try to think like they would. Go to the site you're promoting on, start engaging in their behavior, enter their mindset, then look at your own ad, and If you are not convinced to signup, then why would they be? That is what I have found to help me in my campaigns. I Hope this helps.
@zd__rd Thank you for that summary. That was an interesting read.
I have my background in SEO and I must admit that after studying this pure and direct form of AM, I have been able to take something away already.
My biggest take away from this is that even on other internet projects (not Landing Pages) that seem to be not as profitable as one wanted them to be, there is still major room for improvement based on page designf, copy and conversion optimization as we do on landing pages.
I was always under the impression that this would be only a small part of the equation giving the little extra 10% but as a matter of fact it is much more than that.
I have seen a great follow along campaign here recently using POF. That was my first plan but they do not allow for advertising in Germany it seems. So I would have to try running something else outside of my zone of comfort.
Lets see how it goes. I am not sure if I am going to continue the follow along here as the story has developed itself, but it may be interesting to see a come back with a successful campaign after all.
Having said that, I have discovered this thread here talking about technical issues and really bad CR because of high click-loss just before the offer.
Dating is a TOUGH vertical to be in. It's saturated, with armies of affiliates on platforms like POF battling each other over clicks. The offers are often dogshit and the merchants scrub like hell. But then it's because the industry is so incestuous, with many diverse sites all owned by the same company. So if 'User A' signs up with one site, and you send him to another, you don't get paid because they already have his data. But how in the hell are you supposed to know that?
Landers, optimization, CTR etc is the second step (for me) in the process. The first step is to thoroughly research the offer(s). Ask yourself who is suited to this offer? Where can I find that traffic source? What is the emotion of the traffic (looking/buying/problem solving/desparation etc) and is this a sustainable offer? (assuming the merchant continues to run it). Only then do you move onto the 'tweaking'.
Just my 2 pennies worth.
@ppchound
Thank you for your view on the process, I really appreciate it. I agree and it is refreshing to see a larger picture of it from time to time.
I have to admit however that even with a lot of fantasy some of the offers are hard to integrate into a cohesive story that actually offers enough value. What is an offer that truly offers any value here? One that would convert even with the worst efforts? Even if your banner says... PLEASE DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT... people would still click through AND convert. ))
The closest to it is adult dating if it would really work and people would get laid all the time without any efforts, expenses or emotional stress. But is it really more than a data collection machine? I mean are there real girls from your building looking for sex tonight but you must keep this secret to support the community spirit, and use a condom and respect the partner..... ->See Images now ) ??
don t know, just thinking out loud.
What is an offer that truly offers any value here? -> Gaming actually is where I can see the value.
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